little watering-place which the million will persist in calling by that
name, though scarcely forty years ago the maker and builder of the
modern town, the man who marked out its streets and planned its roads,
and foresaw its future before a brick of the place was laid, gave it
the name of St. Edmunds--Hunstanton, I say, in the fourteenth century
was a parish less than half the size of Heacham, and probably much
further from the sea than it is now. When, on the 20th of March, 1349,
the steward of the manor of Hunstanton held his court there he entered
the name of only one old woman who had died within the last month--that
is, up to the 20th of March the plague had not yet appeared. Five weeks
after this, on the 23rd of April, the next court was held. Five petty
disputes had been entered for hearing. Sixteen men were engaged in them
as principals or witnesses. When the day came eleven of the sixteen
were dead. On the 22nd of May again there was a court, and again three
suits for debt were set down. The defendant in one case, the plaintiff
in a second, both plaintiff and defendant in the third, died before the
court day arrived. In June no court was held--was there a panic? Except
in this month and in September the meetings were carried on as
regularly as if it had all been done by machinery. In September things
got to their worst, and in this month the parson died, and was speedily
succeeded by another. When the court of the 16th of October sat, it was
found that in two months sixty-three men and fifteen women had been
carried off. In thirty-one instances there were only women or children
to succeed; in nine cases there were no heirs, and the little estates
had escheated to the lord. Incredible though it may sound the fact is
demonstrable, that in this one parish of Hunstanton, which a man may
walk round in two or three hours, and the whole population of which
might have assembled in the church then recently built, one hundred and
seventy-two persons, tenants of the manor, died off in eight months;
seventy-four of them left no heirs male, and nineteen others had no
blood relation in the world to claim the inheritance of the dead.
I have no intention of laying before my readers a detailed statement of
the documentary evidence which has passed under my notice. The time has
not come yet for an elaborate report on the case, nor can I pretend to
have done more than break ground upon what must be regarded still as
virgin soil; but this I may safely say, that I have not found one
single roll of any Norfolk manor during this dreadful 23rd year of
Edward, dating after April or May, which did not contain only too
abundant proof of the ravages of the pestilence--evidence which forces
upon me the conviction that hardly a town or village in East Anglia
escaped the scourge; and which in its cumulative force makes it
impossible to doubt that the mortality in Norfolk and Suffolk must have
exceeded the largest estimate which has yet been given by conjecture.
When I find in a stray roll of an insignificant little manor at
Croxton, near Thetford, held on the 24th of July, that seventeen
tenants had died since the last court, eight of them without heirs;
that at another court held the _same day_ at Raynham, at the other end
of the county, eighteen tenements had fallen into the lord's hands,
eight of them certainly escheated, and the rest retained until the
appearance of the heir; that in the manor of Hadeston, a hamlet of
Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, which could not possibly have had
four hundred inhabitants, fifty-four men and fourteen women were
carried off by the pestilence in six months, twenty-four of them
without a living soul to inherit their property; that in manor after
manor the lord was carried off as well as the tenants and the steward;
that in a single year _upwards of eight hundred parishes lost their
parsons,_ eighty-three of them twice, and ten of them three times in a
few months; and that it is quite certain these large numbers represent
only a portion of the mortality among the clergy and the religious
orders--when, I say, I consider all this and a great deal more that
might be dwelt on, I see no other conclusion to arrive at but one,
namely, that during the year ending March, 1350, more than half the
population of East Anglia was swept away by the Black Death. If any one
should suggest that _many more_ than half died, I should not be
disposed to quarrel with him.
It must be remembered that nothing has been here said of the mortality
in the towns. I believe we have no means of getting at any evidence on
this part of the subject which can be trusted. In no part of England
did the towns occupy a more important position relatively to the rest
of the population. In no part of England did three such important towns
as Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich, lie within so short a distance of one
another, not to mention others which were then rising in the number and
consideration of their inhabitants. But the statements made of the
mortality in the towns will not bear examination--they represent mere
guesses, nothing more. This, however, may be assumed as certain--that
the death-rate in the towns at such a time as this cannot have been
less than the death-rate in the villages, and that the scourge which so
cruelly devastated the huts and cabins of the countrymen was not likely
to fall less heavily upon the filthy dens and hovels of the men of the
streets. Town life in the fourteenth century was a very dreadful life
for the masses.
How did the great bulk of the people comport themselves under the
pressure of this unparalleled calamity? How did their faith stand the
strain that was put upon it? How did their moral instincts support
them? Was there any confusion and despair? What effects--social,
political, economical--followed from a catastrophe so terrible? How did
the clergy behave during the tremendous ordeal through which they had
to pass? What glimpses do we get of the horrors or the sorrows of that
time--of the romantic, of the pathetic side of life?
V.
_THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA._ (CONTINUED.)
When Bishop Bateman started on his journey upon the King's business, in
March 1349, he can scarcely have turned his back upon his diocese
without some misgivings as to what might happen during his absence. In
some parts of Norfolk a very grievous murrain had prevailed during the
previous year among the live stock in the farms, and though this had
almost disappeared, there was ample room for anxiety in the outlook. If
the plague had not yet been felt to any extent in East Anglia, it might
burst forth any day. London had been stricken already, and there was no
saying where it would next appear in its most malignant form. It was
hoped that the Bishop's mission would be accomplished in a couple of
months, and during his absence the charge of the diocese was committed
as usual to his officials, to one of whom the palace at Norwich was
assigned as a temporary residence.
The good ship, with the Bishop and his suite, had hardly got out of the
channel, when a storm other than that which sailors care for burst upon
town and village in East Anglia. The Bishop's official found his hands
full of work. In April he was called upon to institute twenty-three
parsons to livings that had fallen vacant. This was bad enough as a
beginning, but it was child's play to what followed. By the end of May
_seventy-four_ more cures had lost their incumbents and been supplied
with successors. That is, in a single month, the number of institutions
throughout the diocese had almost equalled the _annual_ average of the
last five years. All these stricken parishes were country villages, and
the larger number of them lay to the north and east of the county of
Norfolk. We take note of this that we call a fact, and straightway the
temptation presents itself to construct a theory upon it. Who knows not
that in the trying spring-time, the "colic of puff'd Aquilon" makes
life hard for man and beast in Norfolk, and that across our fields the
cruel gusts burst upon us with a bitter petulance, unsparing, pitiless,
hateful, till our vitality seems to be steadily waning? It was in the
month of March that the great plague smote us first:--did it not come
to us on the wings of the wind that swept across the sea the germs of
pestilence, say from Norway, or some neighbour land in which,
peradventure, the Black Death had already spent itself in hideous
havoc? A tempting theory! If I confess that such a view once presented
itself to my own mind I am compelled to acknowledge that I abandoned it
with reluctance. It was hard, but it had to be done. How we all do
hanker after a theory! What! live all your life without a theory? It's
as dreary a prospect as living all your life without a baby, and yet
some few great men have managed to pass through life placidly without
the one or the other, and have not died forgotten or lived forlorn.
The plague had apparently fallen with the greatest virulence upon the
coast and along the watercourses, but already in the spring had reached
the neighbourhood of Norwich, and was showing an unsparing impartiality
in its visitation. At Earlham and Wytton and Horsford, at Taverham and
Bramerton, all of them villages within five miles of the cathedral, the
parsons had already died. Round the great city, then the second city in
England, village was being linked to village closer and closer every
day in one ghastly chain of death. What a ring-fence of horror and
contagion for all comers and goers to overpass!
For two months Thomas de Methwold, the official, stayed where he had
been bidden to stay, in the thick of it all, at the palace. On the 29th
of May he could bear it no longer. Do you ask was he afraid? Not so! We
shall see that he was no craven; but the bravest men are not reckless,
and least of all are they the men who are careless about the lives or
the feelings of others. The great cemetery of the city of Norwich was
at this time actually within the cathedral Close. The whole of the
large space enclosed between the nave of the cathedral on the south and
the bishop's palace on the east, and stretching as far as the Erpingham
gate on the west, was one huge graveyard. When the country parsons came
to present themselves for institution at the palace, they had to pass
straight across this cemetery. The tiny churchyards of the city,
demonstrably very little if at all larger than they are now, were soon
choked, the soil rising higher and higher above the level of the
street, which even to this day is in some cases five or six feet below
the soppy sod piled up within the old enclosures. To the great cemetery
within the Close the people brought their dead, the tumbrels
discharging their load of corpses all day long, tilting them into the
huge pits made ready to receive them; the stench of putrefaction
palpitating through the air, and borne by the gusts of the western
breeze through the windows of the palace, where the Bishop's official
sat, as the candidates knelt before him and received institution with
the usual formalities. It was hard upon him, it was doubly so upon
those who had travelled a long day's journey through the pestilential
villages; and on the 30th of May the official removed from Norwich to
Terlyng, in Essex, where the Bishop had a residence; there he remained
for the next ten days, during which time he instituted thirty-nine more
parsons to their several benefices. By this time other towns in the
diocese had felt the force of the visitation. Ipswich had been smitten,
and Stowmarket, and East Dereham--how many more we cannot tell. Then
the news came that the Bishop had returned; Thomas de Methwold was at
once ordered back to Norwich--come what might, that was his post; there
he should stay, whether to live or die.
The Bishop seems to have landed at Yarmouth about the both of June; he
did not at once push on to report himself to the King; urgent private
affairs detained him in his native county. Seventeen or eighteen miles
to the south-west of Yarmouth lies the village of Gillingham, where the
Bishop's brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman, a man of great wealth and
consideration, had been the lord of the manor. The parish contains
about 2,000 acres, and at this time had at least three churches, only
one of which now remains. Besides these Sir Bartholomew had a private
chapel in his house. Here he kept up much state, as befitted a
personage who had more than once represented Norfolk and Suffolk in
Parliament. The plague came, and the worthy knight was struck down; the
parson too fell a victim; and the Lady Petronilla, Sir Bartholomew's
widow, presented to the living a certain Hugh Atte Mill, who was
instituted on the 7th of June. The first news that the Bishop heard
when he landed was that his brother was dead. He started off at once to
Gillingham. Death had been busy all around, and the plague had broken
out in the Benedictine Nunnery of Bungay and carried off the prioress
among others. Straightway the few nuns that were left chose another
prioress; on the morning of the 13th she came for institution, and
received it at the Bishop's hands. Hurrying on to Norwich, the Bishop
stayed but a single day, leaving his official at the palace. He himself
had to present himself before the King to give account of his mission;
on the 19th he was in London; on the 4th of July he was back again in
his diocese. During the twenty days that had passed since he had left
Gillingham, exactly _one hundred_ clergymen had been admitted to vacant
cures, all of them crossing the horrible cemetery where the callous
gravediggers were at work night and day, the sultry air charged with
suffocating stench, poisoning the breath of heaven. Yet there the
Bishop's vicar-general had to stay, eat, drink, and sleep--if he
could--and there he did stay till the Bishop came back and relieved him
of the dreadful work.
Meanwhile the gentry too had been dying. It is clear that in the upper
ranks the men died more frequently than the women, explain it how you
will. During June and July no fewer than fifteen patrons of livings
were widows, while in thirteen other benefices the patronage was in the
hands of the executors or trustees of gentlemen who had died. During
the month of July in scarcely a village within five miles of Norwich
had the parson escaped the mortality, yet in Norwich the intrepid
Bishop remained in the very thick of it all, as if he would defy the
angel of death, or at least show an example of the loftiest courage.
Only towards the end of July did he yield, perhaps, to the persuasion
or entreaty of others, and moved away to the southern part of his
diocese, taking up his residence at Hoxne, in Suffolk, where he stayed
till October, when he once more returned to his house at Thorpe by
Norwich. The palace had become at last absolutely uninhabitable.
To Hoxne accordingly the newly-appointed clergy came in troops, and
during the first seven weeks after the Bishop's arrival he admitted no
less than eighty-two parsons, a larger number than had been the average
of a whole year heretofore. Did they all betake themselves to their
several parishes and brave the peril and set themselves to the grim
work before them? They could not help themselves. Where the benefice
was a vicarage an oath to reside upon his cure was in every case
rigorously imposed upon the newly-appointed; and though the law did not
sanction this in the case of rectors, yet not a single instance of a
licence of non-residence occurs; the difficulty of finding substitutes
was becoming daily more and more insuperable, and the penalty of
deserting a parish without licence was a great deal too serious to be
disregarded. In the months of June, July, and August things were at
their worst, as might have been expected. In July alone there were two
hundred and nine institutions. During the year ending March, 1350,
considerably more than two-thirds of the benefices of the diocese had
become vacant.
In the religious houses the plague wrought, if possible, worse havoc
still. There were seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk. Five of them
lost their prioresses. How many poor nuns were taken who can guess? In
the College of St. Mary-in-the-fields, at Norwich, five of the seven
prebendaries died. In September the abbot of St. Benet's Hulm was
carried off. Again we ask and receive no answer--what must have been
the mortality among the monks and the servants of the convent? And yet
sometimes we do get an answer to that question. In the house of
Augustinian Canons at Heveringland prior and canons died to a man. At
Hickling, which a century before had been a flourishing house and been
doing good work, only one canon survived. Neither of these houses ever
recovered from the effects of the visitation; they were eventually
absorbed in other monastic establishments.
It is one of the consequences of the peculiar privileges granted to the
Friars that no notice of them occurs in the episcopal records. They
were free lances with whom the bishops had little to do. It is only by
the accident of every one of the Friars of our Lady who had a house in
Norwich having been carried off, and the fact that their house was left
tenantless, that we know anything of their fate. Wadding, the great
annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the notorious decadence in
the _morale_ of the mendicant orders during the fourteenth century--a
decadence which he does not attempt to deny--attributes it wholly to
the action of the Black Death, and is glad to find in that calamity a
sufficient cause for accounting for the loss of the old prestige which
in little more than a century after St. Francis's death had set in so
decidedly. "It was from this cause," he writes, "that the monastic
bodies, and especially the mendicant orders, which up to this time had
been flourishing in virtue and learning, began to decline, and
discipline to become slack; as well from the loss of eminent men as
from the relaxation of the rules, in consequence of the pitiable
calamities of the time; and it was vain to look for reform among the
young men and the promiscuous multitude who were received without the
necessary discrimination, for they thought more of filling the empty
houses than of restoring the old strictness that had passed away." How
could it be otherwise? In the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, at
least _nineteen_ religious houses were left without prior or abbot. We
may be quite sure that where the chief ruler dropped oft the brethren
of the house and the army of servants and hangers-on did not escape.
What happened at the great Abbey of St. Edmund's we know not yet, and
until we get more light it is idle to conjecture but, as a man stands
in that vast graveyard at Bury, and looks around him, he can hardly
help trying--trying, but failing--to imagine what the place must have
looked like when the plague was raging. What a Valley of Hinnom it must
have been! Those three mighty churches, all within a stone's throw of
one another, and one of them just one hundred feet longer than the
cathedral at Norwich, sumptuous with costly offerings, and miracles of
splendour within--and outside ghastly heaps of corruption, and piles of
corpses waiting their turn to be covered up with an inch or two of
earth. Who can adequately realize the horrors of that awful summer? In
the desolate swamps through which the sluggish Bure crawls reluctantly
to mingle its waters with the Yare; by the banks of the Waveney where
the little Bungay nunnery had been a refuge for the widow, the
forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in the valley of the Nar--the
Norfolk Holy Land--where seven monasteries of one sort or another
clustered, each distant from the other but a few short miles--among the
ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the Broads, where the tall reeds
wave and whisper, and all else is silent--the glorious buildings with
their sumptuous churches were little better than centres of contagion.
From the stricken towns people fled to the monasteries, lying away
there in their seclusion, safely, favoured of God. If there was hope
anywhere it must be there. As frightened widows and orphans flocked to
these havens of refuge, they carried the Black Death with them, and
when they dropped death-stricken at the doors, they left the contagion
behind them as their only legacy. Guilty wretches with a load of crime
upon their consciences--desperate as far as this world was concerned,
and ready for any act of wickedness should the occasion
arrive--shuddered lest they should go down to burning flame for ever
now that there was none to shrive them or to give the _viaticum_ to any
late penitent in his agony. In the tall towers by the wayside the bells
hung mute; no hands to ring them or none to answer to their call
Meanwhile, across the lonely fields, toiling dismally, and ofttimes
missing the track--for who should guide them or show the path?--parson
and monk and trembling nun made the best of their way to Norwich; their
errand to seek admission to the vacant preferment. Think of them, after
miles of dreary travelling, reaching the city gates at last, and
shudderingly threading the filthy alleys which then served as streets,
stepping back into doorways to give the dead carts passage, and jostled
by lepers and outcasts, the touch of whose garments was itself a
horror. Think of them staggering across the great cemetery and
stumbling over the rotting carcases not yet committed to the earth,
breathing all the while the tainted breath of corruption--sickening,
loathsome! Think of them returning as they came, going over the same
ground as before, and compelled to gaze again at
Sights that haunt the soul for ever,
Poisoning life till life is done.
Think of them foot-sore, half-famished, hardly daring to buy bread and
meat for their hunger, or to beg a cup of cold water for Christ's sake,
or entreat shelter for the night in their faintness and weariness, lest
men should cry out at them--"Look! the Black Death has clutched another
of the doomed!"
* * * * * * *
I have said that upwards of 800 of the beneficed clergy perished in
East Anglia during this memorable year. Besides these we must make
allowance for the non-beneficed among the regulars; the _chaplains,_
who were in the position of curates among ourselves; the vicars of
parishes whose endowments were insufficient to maintain a resident
parson under ordinary circumstances, and the members of the monastic
and mendicant orders. Putting all these together, it seems to me that
we cannot estimate the number of deaths among regular and secular
clergy in East Anglia during the year 1349 at less than _two_
_thousand._ [Footnote: In the diocese of Ely, where the mortality was
less severe than in Norfolk and Suffolk, 57 parsons died in the three
months ending the 1st of October, 1349. When an ordination was held by
the Bishop of Ely's suffragan at the priory of Barnwell on the 19th of
September, the newly-ordained were fewer by 35 than those who had died
at their posts since the last ordination.] This may appear an enormous
number at first hearing, but it is no incredible number. Unfortunately
the earliest record of any ordinations in the diocese of Norwich dates
nearly seventy years after the plague year, but there is every reason
for believing that there were at least _as many,_ and probably many
more, candidates at ordinations in the fourteenth century as presented
themselves in the fifteenth. During the year ending January, 1415,
Bishop Courtenay's suffragan ordained 382 persons, and assuming that in
Bishop Bateman's days an equal number were admitted to the clerical
profession, the losses by death in the plague year would have absorbed
all the clergy who had been ordained during the six previous years, but
no more. Even so this constituted a tremendous strain upon the reserve
force of clergy unbeneficed and more or less unemployed, and it was
inevitable that with such a strain, there would be a deterioration in
the character and fitness of the newly-appointed incumbents. Yet
nothing has surprised me more than the exceeding rareness of evidence
damaging to the reputation of the new men. That these men were less
educated than their predecessors we know; but that they were mere
worthless hypocrites there is nothing to show, and much to disprove.
Nay! the strong impression which has been left upon my mind, and which
gathers strength as I study the subject, is that the parochial clergy
of the fourteenth century, before _and after_ the plague, were
decidedly a better set than the clergy of the thirteenth. The friars
had done some of their best work in "provoking to jealousy" the country
clergy and stimulating them to increased faithfulness; they had, in
fact, made them more _respectable_; just as the Wesleyan revival acted
upon the country parsons and others four centuries later. Until the
episcopal _visitations_ of the monasteries during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries are made public--they exist in far larger numbers
than is usually supposed--it will be impossible to estimate the effect
of the plague upon the religious houses; but I am inclined to think
that the monasteries suffered very greatly indeed from the terrible
visitation, and that the violent disturbance of the old traditions and
the utter breakdown in the old observances acted as disastrously upon
these institutions as the first stroke of paralysis does upon men who
have passed their prime--they never were again what they had been.