The Black Death in London (5 page)

These reflections of London urban life in the summer and autumn of 1348 are just snippets, but taken together they provide a flavour of daily life and death in the busiest city in the land. None of the documents mention anything at all about the plague, but in just a few weeks, by All Hallows’ Eve, this familiar social environment was to face potential obliteration.

An English Pestilence

The various chronicles suggest a date for the arrival of the plague in England between late June and late September. We must assume that what they meant by ‘arrival’ was the first appearance of the symptoms and the evidence of an abnormal death rate. The actual date of landfall may have been some days or possibly weeks earlier, when the pathogen was still in its incubation stage and its first human carriers were infectious but not displaying any symptoms.
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However, there are no certain independent manorial or royal accounts of pestilence anywhere in England before October 1348, and I suggest here that the plague made its first English manifestation in late September or early October, and not in August.
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The royal family itself may have received one of the earliest blows.

Preparations for the marriage of Edward’s daughter Joan to Pedro, infante of Castile, had been under way since as early as 1 January 1348, with establishments that any male heir would inherit the title of King of Castile.
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En route to Spain, Joan and her entourage departed Portsmouth in early August, arriving some time before the 20th. She perished of the plague on 2 September. Edward was probably at Clarendon when the news arrived, but had returned to Westminster before he wrote to the Spanish royal family. His letter, dated 15 October, makes clear his inward desolation caused by the ‘sting of this bitter grief’, but illuminates a brave face on the tragedy as he accepted that he had a daughter in heaven who can ‘gladly intercede for our offences before God himself’.
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Nor was this the sum of Edward’s personal woes. On 5 September, at a lavish and fully regal funeral, Edward’s 3-month-old son,William of Windsor, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. The infant’s body had been brought from Brentford (perhaps having been borne there by boat from Windsor) to London accompanied by fifty paupers ‘of the King’s alms’, carrying torches, for which they were paid
IS
each, and laid out in state in the abbey church. Curiously, the accounting for the paupers’ expenses only appears in the Michaelmas term of Edward’s twenty-third year; in other words, after the cessation of the plague over one year later.
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Probably through the insistence of a king spurred on by such personal disaster, on 28 September 1348 Robert Hathbrand, the prior of Christchurch Canterbury, acting during the vacancy of the Archbishopric, sent to Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, the orders from Edward III originally sent to the late Archbishop Stratford in August. The letter is known as Terribilis, from its opening word.
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In it Hathbrand underlines the imminent disaster: ‘it is now to be feared that the … kingdom is to be oppressed by the pestilences and wretched mortalities … which have flared up in other regions’. Such language indicates that to his knowledge the disease had not yet attacked England. By way of rationalising the coming plague, Hathbrand suggested that God used such devices to ‘terrify and torment men and so drive out their sins’, and exhorted the bishop to organise sermons at suitable times, and processions every Wednesday and Friday to help pacify God through prayer. Those citizens partaking were to be offered indulgences granting them a reduction of their time in Purgatory. The bishop was personally to ensure that these measures were set in place throughout the city and diocese of London, to communicate to his fellow bishops in the southern province, and to report back to the prior before 6 January 1349 to explain what actions had been taken. Ralph Stratford received these instructions by 5 October 1348, and communicated them to, among others, the Bishops of Exeter and Hereford. There, the message was to be spread to the people ‘during procession and sermon in the cathedral’,
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and it is thus very likely that this was the mechanism for informing Londoners, too.

We can be sure that by early October, all of London was aware that death was threatening southern England, and that the city now lay in its path. Quite possibly, the first infected carriers had already entered the city, and the inexorable, invisible spread had begun.

Geoffrey le Baker (d.
c
. 1360), a clerk of Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, in an important chronicle detailing the period 1303–56, claimed that the pestilence entered London on 29 September 1348.
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A later annal from Bermondsey Abbey in Southwark, covering the years 1042–1432, repeats this date, but may have been based on le Baker’s work. However, this date seems rather too early, given the circumstantial evidence from other sources. The number of wills Londoners drew up (six in October) and the number of papal assents to choose confessors does not paint a picture of fear or panic, even if they might hint at an increasing concern.

Four citizens receiving indults to choose their own confessors were Thomas Cavendish, a draper on Cheapside, and Nicholas Ponge, a vintner near Bishopsgate, and two relatives, Matilda and Robert White, the latter a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. In terms of the numbers of wealthy will-making Londoners who were dying, only two wills were proved.
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Covering parishes immediately to the north and east of the city, the court of the Bishop of London’s manor of Stepney, held on 30 October 1348, records no deaths whatsoever, in stark contrast to its next session in early December and subsequent ones.
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So it must be concluded that as yet, the pestilence had not physically manifested in the city, even if its psychological presence may have begun to make itself felt.

Further indirect support for a lack of any increased mortality can be derived from the analysis of 193 probates listed for May 1347 through to November 1348 in the register of Hamo de Hethe, Bishop of Rochester, a diocese which encompassed parishes as close to London as Greenwich. The last entered probates date to 3 November 1348, and a steady monthly average of about nine probates characterises the sample. By 23 December, however, with ‘the plague now raging’, anyone within the diocese was empowered by papal licence to hear confessions of the victims.
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During October 1348, the war with France, negotiations over prisoners captured during the king’s Scottish campaigns – especially the young King David II – and other domestic matters seem to have taken up more of Edward’s energies than any preparation for the plague itself. Perhaps, having established the framework for a spiritual response, he felt able to set the responsibility on the shoulders of the bishops. Certainly his business relating to London reveals no specific evidence of disaster. He remained at Westminster throughout most of October (certainly from the 4th to the 24th), and on the 8th he issued a writ to the sheriffs of London for proclamation to be made ‘for such men-at-arms, hoblers, archers, and others, as were willing to serve the King abroad, to be at Sandwich on Sunday before the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude (28th October) at the latest’.
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Two days later, Edward issued safe conduct until summer 1349 for Joan, wife of David II of Scotland, to come to the Tower of London to keep her husband company, following it up with similar safe conduct until December for Thomas, Bishop of Caithness, to treat for David’s liberation from the Tower (an effort that was unsuccessful).
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On 12 October protection was also offered to the prior of Bermondsey (a Cluniac house still dependent on its French province, so ‘alien’), to whom the king had given custody of the priory during the war with France; royal protection extended to the priory and its community. Similar consideration was given to alms-gathering activities by hospitals in London, and he issued royal protection for two years to the master and brethren of the hospital of St Thomas the Martyr in Southwark.
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Lastly, an investigation into the theft of £188 worth of jewels and other items from a turret in the Tower, sometime between their deposition in 1347 and 25 October 1348, led the king to issue a formal pardon to Bishop William Edington of Winchester, also the king’s treasurer, and to Thomas Crosse and John de Buckingham (canons of Edward’s new college at Westminster), whose responsibility it was to manage such royal assets.
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These issues and correspondences, focusing on current events and royal responsibilities, do not seem to accord at all with the image of a city already wracked by death and disease.

The clearest indication that the killer had not yet begun its harvest was the letter written on 24 October by the Bishop of Winchester while in his chambers in the episcopal palace on the west side of Southwark. The palace was a very substantial Thames-side residence and guaranteed the bishop excellent access to the city and Westminster on the far side of the river. Edington’s letter, written to the prior and chapter of St Swithin’s Winchester and to all other clergy in his diocese, was a call to spiritual arms to protect Winchester and its people. Known as ‘A voice in Rama’ in reference to the Massacre of the Innocents,
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the letter conjured up stark and fearful imagery. Of the villages, towns and cities consumed by the plague, it mourns that ‘all joy within them ceases, all sweetness is dammed up, the sound of mirth silenced, and they become instead places of horror …’ It confirmed the dreadful news that ‘this cruel plague has now begun a … savage attack’ on England’s coastal areas.

Edington, echoing Zouche, Shrewsbury and others, commanded that the monks gather in their choir on Wednesdays and Sundays, and recite the seven penitential psalms and the fifteen psalms of degrees on their knees. On Fridays, the community was to process through the market place singing the same psalms, and also ‘the great litany instituted by the fathers of the church for use against the pestilence’. For the people of his diocese, though, the time for defence had passed: the plague was in all likelihood already among them.

To what Edington’s ‘great litany’ refers is not exactly clear. It is obvious that a special processional prayer against the plague had been constructed. It may have been based in some form on the
missa pro mortalitate evitanda,
the Mass for avoiding the plague, which had been compiled by Pope Clement VI in Avignon.
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This Mass promised 260 days of indulgence to all who heard it and were truly contrite and confessed, and guaranteed that all who heard it on five consecutive days, kneeling with a candle in their hands, would not succumb to sudden death. Its efficacy had apparently been proved in Avignon and surrounding parts. Whatever the content of the litany was, the letter itself, written in London, must surely demonstrate that the plague was as yet unfelt in the capital.

As October drew to a close, changes to civic administration were in train. Thomas Leggy’s term at the Guildhall as London’s mayor came to an end, and he was replaced by John Lovekyn.
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It was to be Lovekyn’s term that encompassed almost exactly the duration of the plague. Meanwhile, the king had selected John de Offord, then Chancellor of England, dean of Lincoln, and prebend of St Paul’s Cathedral, as his preferred candidate for the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Pope favoured the decision (despite the fact that the chapter at Canterbury wished another London canon, Thomas Bradwardine, to take his place). De Offord’s selection was inevitable given his powerful support; once confirmed, he would gain access to the great London archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, but he would not be able to retain all the properties held through St Paul’s Cathedral: in a letter of 24 October to John de Carleton (the canon of Wells who helped negotiate the truce with France), the Pope reserved to the latter the canonry and prebend of Tottenhale, which de Offord would have to resign on his elevation.
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This moated site stood on the site of the modern junction between Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, and thus in easy reach of the main western route to the city, but it has now long since vanished completely. In contrast, Lambeth Palace, directly across the Thames from Westminster, still stands remarkably complete.

In late October, in a chamber near the heart of the palace, Robert of Avesbury, the archbishop’s commissory clerk, was no doubt hard at work. Avesbury was probably London’s most credible eye-witness chronicler to the unfolding disaster that encompassed the city, and it is in his
de Gestis Mirabilibus Regis Edwardi Tertii
that we are provided with the date of All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1348, as the beginning of the visible signs of pestilence in the city, as it took root and ‘daily deprived many of life’.
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