THE BLACK DEATH.
The most likely of the fourteenth-century English annalists to have given
us a good account of the Black Death was the historian Ranulphus Higden,
author of the _Polychronicon_, who became a monk of St Werburgh’s abbey at
Chester about the beginning of the century, and lived to see the
disastrous year of 1349[212]. That part of his history which relates to
his own period he brings down year by year to 1348, with less fulness of
detail in the later years, as if old age were making him brief. Under the
year 1348 he begins the subject of the great mortality, speaks of the
incessant rains of the second half of the year from Midsummer to
Christmas, refers to the ravages of the plague at Avignon, the then
ecclesiastical capital of Christendom, just mentions England and Ireland,
and then lets the pen fall from his hand. Higden is believed to have
resumed his annals after 1352; but he was then a very old man, and the
last entries are unimportant. But the period from 1348 to 1352 is an
absolute blank. He comes to the edge of the great subject of that time, as
if he had intended to deal with it comprehensively, beginning with a
notice of the previous weather, which is by no means irrelevant, and after
two or three lines more he breaks off. Most of the monastic chronicles are
interrupted at the same point; if there is an entry at all under the year
1349 it is for the most part merely the words magna mortalitas. The
prevailing sense of desolation and despair comes out in the record made by
a friar of Kilkenny, who kept a chronicle of passing events, and escaped
the fate of his brethren in the convent only long enough to record a few
particulars of the great mortality[213]:
“And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the
convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which
happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from
persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should
perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to
come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying,
as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till
it come--as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these
things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer,
and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for
continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of
Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have
commenced.”
There is nothing in the English chronicles so directly personal as that,
but there are some facts recorded of the mortality in four of them which
have contemporary value, or almost contemporary. The best of these
accounts, as a piece of history, is that of Henry Knighton, canon of
Leicester[214], who acknowledges his indebtedness to Higden’s
_Polychronicon_ for the events down to 1326, but after that date either
writes from his own observation or takes his facts from some unknown
contemporary source. The next in importance is Geoffrey le Baker[215], a
clerk of the abbey of Osney, near Oxford, whose account of the arrival of
the Black Death in England has obtained wide currency as copied literally
in the 1605 edition of Stow’s _Annals_. The third is Robert de
Avesbury[216], whose _History of Edward III._ serves as a chronicle for
the city of London more particularly. The fourth is the Malmesbury monk
who wrote, about 1367, the chronicle known as the _Eulogium_[217].
From the systematic paragraphs of those writers, and from various other
incidental notices, an outline of the progress of the pestilence in
England, Scotland and Ireland, may be traced. It entered English soil at a
port of Dorsetshire--said in the _Eulogium_ to have been Melcombe
(Weymouth)--in the beginning of August, 1348. It is said to have spread
rapidly through Dorset, Devon and Somerset, almost stripping those
counties of their inhabitants, and to have reached Bristol by the 15th of
August. The people of Gloucester in vain tried to keep out the infection
by cutting off all intercourse with Bristol; from Gloucester it came to
Oxford, and from Oxford to London, reaching the capital at Michaelmas,
according to one account, or at All Saints (1st November) according to
another. Although the 15th of August is definitely given as the date of
its arrival at Bristol from the Dorset coast, it must not be assumed that
the infection covered the ground so quickly as that in the rest of its
progresses. We have a measure of the rate of its advance south-westward
through Devonshire to Cornwall, in a contemporary entry in the register of
the Church of Friars Minor at Bodmin[218]: confirming the independent
statements that the pestilence entered England at the beginning of August,
the register goes on to record that it reached the town of Bodmin shortly
before Christmas, and that there died in that town about fifteen hundred
persons, as estimated.
The corporation records of Bridport, a town near to the place in Dorset
where the infection landed, show that four bailiffs held office, instead
of two, in the 23rd of Edward III., _in tempore pestilentiae_; the 23rd of
Edward III. would begin 25 Jan. 1349, but the municipal year would
probably have extended from September 1348, so that Bridport may have had
the infection before the end of that year[219]. It seems probable that the
smaller towns, and the villages, all over the South-west, had been
infected in the end of 1348, but somewhat later than Bristol and
Gloucester. The mandate of Ralph, bishop of Bath and Wells, “On
confessions in the time of the pestilence,” is dated Wynchelcomb, 4. id.
Jan. M.CCC.XLVIII. (10 January, 1349) and it speaks of the contagion
spreading everywhere, and of many parish churches and other cures in his
diocese being left without curate and priest to visit the sick and
administer the sacraments[220].
The autumn of 1348 may be taken, then, as correct for the South-west; and
there is no doubt that the infection had been severe enough in London
before the end of that year to move the authorities to action.
“Owing to the increasing severity of the sudden plague day by day at
Westminster and places adjoining,” Parliament was prorogued on the 1st of
January, 1349[221]. There was a further prorogation on the 10th of March,
for the reason given that “the pestilence was continuing at Westminster,
in the city of London, and in other places, more severely than before”
(_gravius solito_)[222]. This agrees with Avesbury’s statement that the
epidemic in London reached a height (_in tantum excrevit_) after
Candlemas, 1349, and that it was over about Pentecost. One of the best
proofs of the season and duration of the Black Death in London is got from
the number of wills enrolled in the Husting Court of the city in the
successive months. Those who died of the plague leaving wills were, of
course, but a small fraction of the whole mortality; but the wills during
some eight months of 1349 are ten or fifteen times more numerous than in
any other year before or after, excepting perhaps the year of the _pestis
secunda_, 1361. Starting from 3 in November, 1348 (none in December), the
probates rise to 18 in January, 1349, 42 in February, 41 in March, none in
April (owing to paralysis of business, doubtless), but 121 in May, 31 in
June, 51 in July, none in August and September, 18 in October, 27 in
November, and then an ordinary average[223]. Thus it would have had a
duration of some seven or eight months in the capital, with a curve of
increase, maximum intensity, and decrease, just as the great London
epidemics of the same disease in the 16th and 17th centuries are known
from the weekly bills to have had.
It does not appear to have been felt at all in Norwich and other places in
the Eastern Counties until the end of March, 1349, its enormous ravages in
that part of England falling mostly in the summer. There is a definite
statement that it began at York about the feast of the Ascension, by which
time it had almost ceased in London, and that it lasted in the capital of
the northern province until the end of July. The infection almost emptied
the abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, of its monks, and the abbey lands of
their tenants; and the date given in the abbey chronicle is the month of
August, 1349. The spring and summer of that year appear to have been the
seasons of the great mortality all over England, excepting perhaps in the
southern counties where the outbreak began; even at Oxford, which is one
of the towns mentioned as on the route of the pestilence from Dorsetshire
to London, the mortality is entered under the year 1349, which was also
the year of its enormous prevalence among the farmers and peasants on the
manor of Winslow, in the county of Bucks.
Its invasion of the mountainous country of Wales (by no means exempt from
plague in the 17th century) may have been a season later--_anno sequenti_,
says Le Baker, which may mean either 1349 or 1350. In the Irish annals,
the first mention of the pestilence is under the year 1348; but it was
probably only the rumour of the mortality at Avignon and elsewhere abroad
that caused the alarm in Ireland among ecclesiastics and in gatherings of
the people. It was first seen on the shores of Dublin Bay, at Howth and
Dalkey, and a little farther north on the coast at Drogheda; it raged in
Dublin “from the beginning of August until the Nativity[224],” which may
mean the year 1348, although the year 1349 is the date given for the great
mortality in Ireland in later chronicles.
The experience of Scotland illustrates still farther the slow progression
of the plague, and its dependence to some extent upon the season of the
year. Two English chroniclers (Le Baker and Knighton) mention that it got
among the Scots assembled in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion at the
time when the mortality was greatest in the northern counties, the autumn
of 1349. But the winter cold must have held it in check as regards the
rest of Scotland; for it is clear from Fordoun that its great season in
that country generally was the year 1350. Thus the Black Death may be said
to have extended over three seasons in the British Islands--a partial
season in the south of England in 1348, a great season all over England,
in Ireland and in the south of Scotland in 1349, and a late extension to
Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the
Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the
northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350.
Symptoms and Type of the Black Death.
This sweeping pestilence was part of a great wave of infection which
passed over Europe from the remote East, and of which we shall trace the
antecedents in the latter part of this chapter. The type and symptoms of
the disease are sufficiently well-known from foreign descriptions--by Guy
de Chauliac and Raymond de Chalin, both of Avignon, by Boccaccio, and by
the Villani of Florence. It was the bubo-plague, a disease which is known
to have existed in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and made its first
great incursion from that country into Europe in the reign of Justinian in
the year 543 (see Chapter I.). Its second great invasion, but from a new
direction, was the Black Death of 1347-9; and from that time it remained
domesticated in the soil of Europe for more than three hundred years as
“the plague.” The first medical descriptions of it by native British
writers are comparatively late. Manuscript treatises or “ordinances” on
the plague circulated in England from the reign of Richard II., most of
them being copies of a short work of no great value by one John of
Burgoyne or John of Bordeaux. There is also extant an English translation
in manuscript, assigned to the 14th century (but belonging to the end of
it, if not to the 15th), of a really good work on the plague by the bishop
of Aarhus, in Denmark, of which I shall have more to say in the next
chapter. But none of these give English experience; and the earliest of
our 16th century plague-books, by Phaer, is a compilation mostly, if not
entirely, from the Danish bishop’s treatise, the latter having been
printed in its English form in or near 1480. It is not until we come to
the work of Dr Gilbert Skene of Edinburgh, printed in 1568, that we find a
treatise on plague showing traces of first-hand observation and
reflection. Then follow the essay of Simon Kellwaye on the London plague
of 1593, and that of the well-known Elizabethan poet and physician Thomas
Lodge, on the plague of 1603. Thus the reign of the plague in Britain was
approaching an end before the native medical profession began to write
upon it. Its eventful history from its arrival in 1348 down to a
comparatively late period has to be constructed from other materials than
the records or systematic writings of the faculty.
The type of the Black Death in England is sufficiently indicated by Le
Baker, who was probably living at Osney, near Oxford, when the infection
began, and indubitably by friar Clyn of Kilkenny. Le Baker mentions the
_apostemata_ or swellings in diverse parts, their sudden eruption, and
their extreme hardness and dryness, so that hardly any fluid escaped when
they were lanced according to the usual method of treating them[225]. He
speaks also of a peculiarly fatal form, from which few or none recovered;
it was characterised by “small black pustules” on the skin, probably the
livid spots or “tokens” which came to be considered the peculiar mark of
the plague, and were certainly the index of a malignant type of it, just
as the corresponding haemorrhages are in pestilential fever (or typhus)
and in yellow fever. The disease, he adds, was swift in doing its work:
one day people were in high health and the next day dead and buried.
Knighton also says, with special reference to Bristol, that the attack was
fatal sometimes within twelve hours, and usually within three days at the
most. The treatment, which would have been, according to all subsequent
experience, the privilege only of those who could pay for it, would appear
to have consisted in lancing the risings or botches in the armpits, neck,
or groins; these were the lymph-glands enlarged to the size of a walnut or
of a hen’s egg, and of a livid colour,--the most striking and certain of
all the plague-signs.
Clyn’s account of the disease, as he saw it at Kilkenny in 1349, is
important for including one remarkable symptom on which great importance
has been laid as distinctive of the Black Death among the epidemics of
bubo-plague, namely haemorrhage from the lungs: “For many died from
carbuncles, and boils, and botches which grew on the legs and under the
arms; others from passion of the head, as if thrown into a frenzy; others
by vomiting blood[226].” It was so contagious, he says, that those who
touched the dead, or even the sick, were incontinently infected that they
died, and both penitent and confessor were borne together to the same
grave. Such was the fear and horror of it that men scarce dared exercise
the offices of pity, namely, to visit the sick and bury the dead. Clyn’s
list of symptoms includes all the most prominent features of the plague as
we shall find them described for the great epidemics of the Stuart
period--the botches in the armpits or groins, the carbuncles, the boils
(or blains), and the frenzy or delirium, as well as the special symptom of
the great mortality--vomiting of blood.
Of the botch, which was the most striking sign of the plague, the
following description, by Woodall (1639), may be introduced here, to
supplement the more meagre accounts of the bubo-plague on its first
appearance. Woodall had himself suffered from the bubo or botch on two
occasions, in its comparatively safe suppurating form; his description
relates to the hard, tense, and dry botch, especially mentioned by Le
Baker for 1349, and always the index of great malignity:
“But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as
in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on
or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh,
pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being
commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh
being also inflamed[227].”
Of this disease, says Le Baker, few of the first rank died, but of the
common people an incalculable number, and of the clergy and the cleric
class a multitude known to God only. It was mostly the young and strong
who were cut off, the aged and weakly being commonly spared. No one dared
come near the sick, and the bodies of the dead were shunned. Both Le Baker
and Knighton speak of whole villages and hamlets left desolate, and of
numbers of houses, both great and small, left empty and falling to ruin.
It was not merely one in a house that died, says friar Clyn of Kilkenny,
but commonly husband, wife, children and domestics all went the same way
of death; the friar himself wrote as one _inter mortuos mortem expectans_.
Without naming the locality, Avesbury says that in a single day, twenty,
forty, sixty or more corpses were buried in the same trench[228]. The
stereotyped phrase in the monastic chronicles is that not more than a
tenth part of the people were left alive. However, the author of the
_Eulogium_, a monk of Malmesbury who brought his history down to 1366,
gives a numerical estimate at the other extreme. He says that the plague
entered England at Melcumbe, destroyed innumerable people in Dorset, Devon
and Somerset, and, having left few alive in Bristol, proceeded northwards,
leaving no city, nor town, nor hamlet, nor scarcely a house, in which it
did not cut off the greater part of the people, or the whole of them; but
he adds, somewhat inconsequently, “so that a fifth part of the men, women
and children in all England were consigned to the grave[229].” These are
the vague contemporary estimates of the mortality--ranging from
nine-tenths to one-fifth of the whole population. It is possible, however,
to come much nearer to precision by the systematic use of documents; and
in that exercise we shall now proceed, in an order from the more general
to the more particular.
Estimates of the Mortality.
There are two State documents the language of which favours the more
moderate kind of estimate. In a letter of the king[230], dated 1 December,
1349, or after the epidemic was over, to the mayor and bailiffs of
Sandwich, ordering them to watch all who took ship for foreign parts so as
to arrest the exit of men and money, the preamble or motive is: “Quia non
modica pars populi regni nostri Angliae praesenti Pestilentia est
defuncta.” (Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our kingdom of
England is dead of the present pestilence.) The Statute of Labourers, 18
November, 1350, begins: “Quia magna pars populi, et maximé operariorum et
servientium jam in ultima pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as a great
part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers, is dead in the
late pestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans
and labourers as these were its special subjects, but the _maximé
operariorum et servientium_ may be fairly taken in a literal sense to mean
that the adult and able-bodied of the working class suffered most. One of
the contemporary chronicles says that the women and children were sent to
take the places of the men in field labour[231]. It is also significant
that the “second plague” of 1361 is named by two independent chroniclers
the _pestis puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their
turn. The _pestis secunda_ was also notable, both in England and on the
Continent, for the numbers of the nobility which it carried off, and in
that respect it was contrasted with the Black Death.
Next we come to certain numerical statements as to the mortality of 1349,
which have an air of precision. They relate to Leicester, Oxford, Bodmin,
Norwich, Yarmouth and London. In Leicester, according to Knighton, who was
a canon there at the time or shortly after, the burials from the Black
Death were more than 700 in St Margaret’s churchyard, more than 400 in
Holy Cross parish (afterwards St Martin’s), more than 380 in St Leonard’s
parish, which was a small one, and in the same proportion in the other
parishes, which were three or four in number, and none of them so large as
the two first named. Knighton’s round numbers for three parishes are not
improbable, considering that Leicester was a comparatively populous town
at the time of the poll-tax of 1377: the numbers who paid the tax were
2101, which would give, by the usual way of reckoning, a population of
3939. The population of the same three parishes in 1558, or shortly after
the period when English towns were described in the statute of 32 Henry
VIII. as being much decayed, would have been about 820 in St Margaret’s,
800 in St Martin’s (Holy Cross), and 160 in St Leonard’s[232]. In 1712,
when the hosiery industry had been flourishing for thirty years, the
population of St Margaret’s was about 1900 and of St Martin’s about 1750,
the estimated population of the whole town having been 6450, or about
one-half more than we may assume it to have been in 1349.
In order to realise what the pestilence of 1349 meant to these parishes of
Leicester, let us take the actual burials from the parish register of one
of them, St Martin’s, in the comparatively mild plague years of 1610 and
1611, a period when the population, as calculated from the annual averages
of births and deaths, would have been from 3000 to 3500, probably less,
therefore, by some hundreds than it was in the years before the Black
Death. In 1610 there were 82 burials in St Martin’s parish, or about twice
the average of non-plague years; in 1611 there were 128 burials, or three
to four times the annual average[233]. Knighton’s 400 deaths for the same
parish in 1349 would mean that the ordinary burials were multiplied about
ten times; while his figures for two other parishes would mean a still
greater ratio of increase[234].
For Oxford the estimate is not less precise or more moderate. “’Tis
reported,” says Anthony Wood, under the year 1349, “that no less than
sixteen bodies in one day were carried to one churchyard[235].”
The information for Bodmin, in Cornwall, comes from William of
Worcester[236] who read it, about a century after the event, in the
register of the Franciscan church in that town. The entry in the register
was doubtless made at the time, and as made by Franciscans familiar with
burials it deserves some credit for approximate accuracy. The deaths are
put down in round numbers at fifteen hundred, which may seem large for
Bodmin at that date. But the truth is that the Cornish borough was a
place of relatively greater importance then than afterwards. In the king’s
writ of 1351, for men-at-arms, in which each town was rated on the old
basis before the Black Death, Bodmin comes fourteenth in order, being
rated at eight men, while such towns as Gloucester, Hereford and
Shrewsbury are rated at ten each. It may well have had a population of
three or four thousand, of which the numbers said to have died in the
great mortality would be less than one-half.
Perhaps the most satisfactory reckoning of the dead from contemporary
statements is that which can be made for London. The disease, as we know,
reached the capital at Michaelmas or All Souls (1st November), and its
prevalence led to a prorogation of Parliament on the 1st of January, and
again on the 10th of March, the reason assigned for the farther
prorogation being that the pestilence was raging _gravius solito_--more
severely than usual. The winter mortality must have been considerable,
although doubtless the season of the year kept it in check, as in all
subsequent experience. But there is evidence that three more
burying-places became necessary early in the year 1349. One of these, of
no great extent, was on the east side of the City, in the part that is now
the Minories[237]; and two were on the north side, not far apart. Of the
latter, one formerly called Nomansland, in West Smithfield, was also of
small extent[238]; but the other was a field of thirteen acres and a rood,
which became in the course of years the property of the Carthusians and
the site of the Charterhouse (partly covered now by Merchant Taylors
School). The larger burial-ground, called Manny’s cemetery after its donor
sir Walter Manny, the king’s minister and high admiral, was consecrated by
the bishop of London and opened for use at Candlemas, 1349. Now comes in
the testimony of Avesbury, the only chronicler of good authority for
London in those years. The mortality increased so much, he says (_in
tantum excrevit_), that there were buried in Manny’s cemetery from the
feast of the Purification (when it was opened) until Easter more than 200
in a single day (_quasi diebus singulis_), besides the burials in other
cemeteries[239]. The language of the chronicler implies that the burials
in the new cemetery rose to a maximum of 200 in a day. The Black Death
must have been like the great London plagues of later times in this
respect, at least, that it rose to a height, remained at its highest level
for some two, three or four weeks, and gradually declined. A maximum of
200 in a day, in the cemetery which would have at that stage received
nearly all the dead, would mean a plague-mortality from first to last, or
an epidemic curve, not unlike that of the London plague of 1563, for which
we have the exact weekly totals[240]: the five successive weeks at the
height of that plague (Sept. 3 to Oct. 8) produced mortalities of 1454,
1626, 1372, 1828 and 1262; and the epidemic throughout its whole curve of
intensity from June to December caused a mortality of 17,404. If
Avesbury’s figures had been at all near the mark, the Black Death in
London would have been a twenty-thousand plague, or to make a most liberal
allowance for burials in other cemeteries than Manny’s when the epidemic
was at its worst, it might have been a thirty-thousand plague. Even at the
smaller of those estimates it would have been a much more severe
visitation upon the London of Edward III. than the plague with 17,404
deaths was upon the London of the 5th of Elizabeth.
The mortality of London in the Black Death has been usually estimated at a
far higher figure than 20,000 or 30,000. There was a brass fixed to a
stone monument in the Charterhouse churchyard (Manny’s cemetery), bearing
an inscription which was read there both by Stow and Camden. Stow gives
the Latin words, of which the following is a translation: “Anno Domini
1349, while the great pestilence was reigning, this cemetery was
consecrated, wherein, and within the walls of the present monastery, were
buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead, besides many more from
that time to the present, on whose souls may God have mercy. Amen.” Camden
says the number on the brass was forty thousand, but his memory had
probably misled him[241]. This has been accepted as if trustworthy,
apparently because it was inscribed upon a monument in the cemetery; and
it has been argued that if one cemetery received 50,000 corpses in the
plague, the other cemeteries and parish churchyards of London would have
together received as many more, so that the whole mortality of London
would have been 100,000[242].
But that mode of reckoning disregards alike the scrutiny of documents and
the probabilities of the case. The inscription bears upon it that it was
written subsequent to the erection of the Carthusian monastery, which was
not begun until 1371[243]. The round estimate of 50,000 is at least
twenty-two years later than the mortality to which it relates, and may
easily have been magnified by rumour in the course of transmission. Even
if it had contemporary value we should have to take it as the roughest of
guesses. The latter objection applies in a measure to Avesbury’s estimate
of 200 burials in a day at the height of the epidemic; but clearly it is
easier to count correctly up to 200 in a day than to 50,000 in the space
of three or four months. On the ground of probability, also, the number of
50,000 in one cemetery (or 100,000 for all London) is wholly incredible.
The evidence to be given in the sequel shows that the mortality was about
one-half the population. Assuming one-half as the death-rate, that would
have brought the whole population of London in the 23rd of Edward III. up
to about 200,000--a number hardly exceeded at the accession of James I.,
after a great expansion which had proceeded visibly in the Elizabethan
period under the eyes of citizens like John Stow, had crowded the
half-occupied space between the City gates and the bars of the Liberties,
and had overflowed into the out-parishes to such an extent that
proclamations from the year 1580 onwards were thought necessary for its
restraint[244].
Hardly any details of the Black Death in London are known, but the few
personal facts that we have are significant. Thus, in the charter of
incorporation of the Company of Cutlers, granted in 1344, eight persons
are named as wardens, and these are stated in a note to have been all dead
five years after, that is to say, in the year of the Black Death, 1349,
although their deaths are not set down to the plague[245]. Again, in the
articles of the Hatters’ Company, which were drawn up only a year before
the plague began (Dec. 13, 1347), six persons are named as wardens, and
these according to a note of the time were all dead before the 7th of
July, 1350[246], the cause of mortality being again unmentioned probably
because it was familiar knowledge to those then living. It is known also
that four wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company died in the year of the Black
Death. These instances show that the plague, on its first arrival, carried
off many more of the richer class of citizens than it did in the
disastrous epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same
is shown by the number of wills, already given. Perhaps the greatest of
the victims of plague in London was Bradwardine, “doctor profundus,” the
newly-appointed archbishop of Canterbury, who died at Lambeth, with the
fatal botch in the armpits, on 26 Aug. 1349, just a week after landing at
Dover from Avignon.
The often-quoted figures for Norwich, 57,374 deaths in the city from the
pestilence of 1349, are wholly incredible. They are derived from an entry
in the borough records in the Gildhall[247]: “In yis yere was swiche a
Dethe in Norwic that there died of ye Pestilence LVII Mil III C LXXIIII
besyd Relygius and Beggars.” We should probably come much nearer the truth
by reading “XVII Mil.” for “LVII Mil.” It does not appear at what time the
entry was made, nor by what computation the numbers were got. Norwich was
certainly smaller than London; in the king’s writ of 1351 for men-at-arms,
London’s quota is 100, and that of Norwich 60; the next in order being
Bristol’s, 20, and Lynn’s, 20. These were probably the old proportions,
fixed before the Black Death, and re-issued in 1351 without regard to what
had happened meanwhile, and they correspond on the whole to the number of
parishes in each city (about 120 in London and 60 in Norwich[248]).
Norwich may have had from 25,000 to 30,000 people before the pestilence,
but almost certainly not more. The city must have suffered terribly in
1349, for we find, by the returns in the Subsidy Roll showing the amount
raised by the poll-tax of 1377 and the numbers in each county and town on
whom it was levied, that only 3952 paid the tax in Norwich, whereas 23,314
paid it in London[249]. That is a very different proportion from the 60 to
100, as in the writ for men-at-arms; and the difference is the index of
the decline of Norwich down to the year 1377. In that year, the
population, by the usual reckoning from the poll-tax, would have been
about 7410; and it is conceivable that at least twice that number had died
of the plague within the city during the spring and summer of 1349.
The figures given of the mortality at Yarmouth, 7052, are those inscribed
upon a document or a brass that once stood in the parish church; it was
seen there in the fifteenth century by William of Worcester, a squire of
the Fastolf family connected with Yarmouth, who gives the numbers as 7000,
giving also the exact dimensions of the great church itself[250]. They are
adduced by the burgesses of Yarmouth in a petition of 17 Henry VII.
(1502), as follows: “Buried in the parish church and churchyard of the
said town 7052 men.” Yarmouth, like Norwich, suffered unusually from the
Black Death; in 1377, by the poll-tax reckoning, its population was about
3639. It may be assumed to have lost more than half its people; but it
recovered quickly, was made a seat of the wool-staple, and threatened to
rival Norwich.
Clyn’s statement that 14,000 died in Dublin from the beginning of August
until Christmas may also be taken merely as illustrating the inability of
early writers to count correctly up to large numbers.
The most trustworthy figures of mortality in the Black Death which were
recorded at the time are those given for the inmates of particular
monasteries; and these are such as to give colour to the remark
interpolated in Higden’s _Polychronicon_ that “in some houses of religion,
of twenty there were left but twain.”
At St Albans, the abbot Michael died of the common plague at Easter, 1349,
one of the first victims in the monastery. The mortality in the house
increased daily, until forty-seven monks, “eminent for religion,” and
including the prior and sub-prior, were dead, besides those who died in
large numbers in the various cells or dependencies of the great religious
house[251]. At the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, the
visitation was in August, although the epidemic in the city of York was
already over by the end of July[252]. The abbot Hugh died at Meaux on the
12th of August, and five other monks were lying unburied the same day.
Before the end of August twenty-two monks and six lay-brethren had died,
and when the epidemic was over there were only ten monks and lay-brethren
left alive out of a total of forty-three monks (including the abbot) and
seven lay-brethren. The chronicler adds that the greater part of the
tenants on the abbey lands died also[253]. In the Lincolnshire monastery
of Croxton, all the monks died save the abbot and prior[254]. In the
hospital of Sandon, Surrey, the master and brethren all died[255].
At Ely 28 monks survived out of 43[256]. In the Irish monasteries the
mortality had been equally severe: in the Franciscan convent at Drogheda,
25 friars died; in the corresponding fraternity at Dublin, 23; and in that
of Kilkenny 8 down to the 6th of March[257], with probably others (Clyn
himself) afterwards.
The following mortalities have been collected for East Anglian religious
houses: At Hickling, a religious house in Norfolk, with a prior and nine
or ten canons (‘Monasticon’), only one canon survived. At Heveringham in
the same county the prior and canons died to a man. At the College of St
Mary in the Fields, near Norwich, five of the seven prebendaries died. Of
seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk, five lost their prioress as well
as an unknown number of nuns[258]. At the nunnery of Great Winthorp on the
Hill, near Stamford, all the nuns save one either died of the plague or
fled from it, so that the house fell to ruin and the lands were annexed by
a convent near it[259].
The experience of Canterbury appears to have been altogether different,
and was perhaps exceptional. In a community of some eighty monks only four
died of the plague in 1349[260]. It is known, however, that when the new
abbot of St Albans halted at Canterbury on his way to Avignon after his
election at Easter, one of the two monks who accompanied him was there
seized with plague and died[261].
These monastic experiences in England were the same as in other parts of
Europe. At Avignon, in 1348, sixty-six Carmelite monks were found lying
dead in one monastery, no one outside the walls having heard that the
plague was amongst them. In the English College at Avignon the whole of
the monks are said to have died[262].
What remains to be said of the death-rate in the great mortality of 1349
is constructive or inferential, and that part of the evidence, not the
least valuable of the whole, has been worked out only within a recent
period. The enormous thinning of the ranks of the clergy was recorded at
the time, in general terms, by Knighton, and the difficulty of supplying
the parishes with educated priests is brought to light by various things,
including the founding of colleges for their education at Cambridge
(Corpus Christi) and at Oxford (Durham College). The first to examine
closely the number of vacancies in cures after the great mortality was
Blomefield in the third volume of the _History of Norfolk_ published in
1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a
reference to No. IV. of the _Lib. Instit._), shows 863 institutions to
benefices in 1349, “the clergy dying so fast that they were obliged to
admit numbers of youths, that had only devoted themselves for clerks by
being shaven, to be rectors of parishes[263].” A more precise use of
Institution Books, but more to show how zealous the clergy had been in
exposing themselves to infection than to ascertain the death-rate, was
made (1825) for the archdeaconry of Salop. It was found that twenty-nine
new presentations, after death-vacancies, had been made in the single year
of 1349, the average number of death vacancies at the time having been
three in two years[264]. The first systematic attempt to deduce the
mortality of 1349 from the number of benefices vacant through death was
made in 1865 by Mr Seebohm, by original researches for the diocese of York
and by using Blomefield’s collections for the diocese of Norwich[265]. In
the archdeaconry of the West Riding there were 96 death vacancies in 1349,
leaving only 45 parishes in which the incumbent had survived. In the East
Riding 60 incumbents died out of 95 parishes. In the archdeaconry of
Nottingham there were deaths of priests in 65 parishes, and 61 survivals.
In the diocese of Norwich there were 527 vacancies by death or transfer,
while in 272 benefices there was no change. Thus the statement made to the
pope by the bishop of Norwich, that two-thirds of the clergy had died in
the great mortality is almost exact for his own diocese as well as for the
diocese of York. These figures of mortality among the Norfolk clergy were
confirmed, with fuller details, by a later writer[266]: the 527 new
institutions in the diocese of Norwich fall between the months of March
and October--23 before the end of April; 74 in May; 39 from 30th May to
10th June; 100 from 10th June to 4th July; 209 in July; and 82 more to
October. According to another enumeration of the same author for East
Anglia, upwards of 800 parishes lost their parsons from March 1349 to
March 1350, 83 parishes having been twice vacant, and 10 three times.
There is no mistaking the significance of these facts as regards the
clergy: some two-thirds of a class composed of adult males in moderate
circumstances, and living mostly in country villages, were cut off by the
plague in Norfolk and Suffolk, in Yorkshire and Shropshire, and probably
all over England. That alone would suffice to show that the virus of the
Black Death permeated the soil everywhere, country and town alike. It is
this universality of incidence that chiefly distinguishes the Black Death
from the later outbreaks of plague, which were more often in towns than in
villages or scattered houses, and were seldom in many places in the same
year. But there remains to be mentioned, lastly, evidence inferential from
another source, which shows that the incidence in the country districts
was upon the people at large. That evidence is derived from the rolls of
the manor courts.
It was remarked in one of the earliest works (1852) upon the history of an
English manor and of its courts, that “the real life or history of a
nation is to be gathered from the humble and seemingly trivial records of
these petty local courts[267],” and so the researches of the generation
following have abundantly proved. Much of this curious learning lies
outside the present subject and is unfamiliar to the writer, but some of
it intimately concerns us, and a few general remarks appear to be called
for.
The manor was the unit of local government as the Normans found it. The
lord of the manor and the cultivators of the soil had respectively their
rights and duties, with a court to exact them. There are no written
records of manor courts extant from a period before the reign of Edward
I., when justice began to be administered according to regular forms. But
in the year 1279 we find written rolls of a manor court[268]. From the
reign of Edward III. these rolls begin to be fairly numerous; for example,
there is extant a complete series of them for the manor of Chedzey in
Somerset from 1329-30 to 1413-14. The court met twice, thrice, or four
times in the year, and the business transacted at each sitting was
engrossed by the clerk upon a long roll of parchment. The business related
to fines and heriots payable to the lord by the various orders of tenants
on various occasions, including changes in tenancy, successions by
heirship, death-duties, the marriages of daughters, the births of
illegitimate children, the commission of nuisances, poaching, and all
matters of petty local government. The first court of the year has usually
the longest roll, the parchment being written on one side, perhaps to the
length of twenty or twenty-four inches; the margin bears the amount of
fines opposite each entry; there are occasionally jury lists where causes
had to be tried. Of the community whose business was thus managed a notion
may be formed from the instance of the Castle Combe manor[269]: in 1340 it
had two open fields, each of about 500 acres, on its hill-slopes,
cultivated by 10 freemen tenants, 15 villeins, 11 other bondsmen
cultivating a half-acre each; 8 tenants of cottages with crofts, 12
tenants of cottages without crofts, as well as 3 tenants of cottages in
Malmesbury.
It will be readily understood that an unusual event such as the great
mortality of 1348-49 would leave its mark upon the rolls of the manor
courts; the death-vacancies, with their fines and heriots, and all entries
relating to changes in tenancy, would be unusually numerous. Accordingly
we find in the rolls for that year that there was much to record; at the
first glance the parchments are seen to be written within and without,
like the roll in the prophet’s vision; and that is perhaps all that the
inspection will show unless the student be expert in one of the most
difficult of all kinds of ancient handwriting,--most difficult because
most full of contractions and conventional forms. But by a few those
palaeographic difficulties have been surmounted (doubtless at some cost of
expert labour), and the results as regards the great mortality of 1349
have been disclosed.
The manor of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, belonging to the great abbey of
St Albans, was a large and typical one[270]. Besides the principal village
it had six hamlets. At the manor courts held in 1348-9 no fewer than 153
holdings are entered as changing hands from the deaths of previous
holders, the tenancies being either re-granted to the single heir of the
deceased or to reversioners, or, in default of such, retained by the lord.
Of the 153 deceased tenants, 28 were holders of virgates and 14 of
half-virgates; or, in other words, there died 42 small farmers,
cultivating from forty to fifteen acres each, in half-acre strips
scattered all over the common fields of the manor. These 42 held twice as
much land as all the remaining 111 together; the latter more numerous
class were the crofters, who cultivated one or more half-acre strips: they
would include the various small traders, artisans and labourers of the
village and its hamlets; while the former class represented “the highest
grades of tenants in villenage.”
Of both classes together 153 had died in the great mortality. What
proportion that number bore to the whole body of tenants on the manor may
be inferred from the following: out of 43 jurymen belonging almost
exclusively to the class of larger holders, who had served upon the petty
jury in 1346, 1347 and 1348, as many as 27 had died in 1349; so that we
may reckon three out of every five adult males to have died in the Winslow
district, although it would be erroneous to conclude that the same
proportion of adult women had died, or of aged persons, or of infants and
young children.
Another more varied body of evidence has been obtained from researches in
the rolls of manor courts in East Anglia[271].
In the parish of Hunstanton, in the extreme north of Norfolk, with an area
of about 2000 to 2500 acres, 63 men and 15 women had been carried off in
two months: in 31 of these instances there were only women and children to
succeed, and in 9 of the cases there were no heirs at all; the whole
number of tenants of the manor dead in eight months was 172, of whom 74
left no heirs male, and 19 others had no blood relations left to claim the
inheritance. The following is the record of the manor court of Cornard
Parva, a small parish in Suffolk: on 31st March, 1349, 6 women and 3 men
reported dead; on 1st May, 13 men and 2 women, of whom 7 had no heirs; at
the next meeting on 3 November, 36 more deaths of tenants, of whom 13 left
no heirs. At Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich,
which could not possibly have had 400 inhabitants, 54 men and 14 women
were carried off in six months, 24 of them without anyone to inherit. At
the manor court of Croxton, near Thetford, on 24th July, 17 deaths are
reported since last court, 8 of these without heirs. At the Raynham court,
on the same day, 18 tenements had fallen into the lord’s hands, 8 of them
absolutely escheated, and the rest retained until the heir should appear.
At other courts, the suits set down for hearing could not be proceeded
with owing to the deaths of witnesses (e.g. 11 deaths among 16 witnesses)
or of principals. The manor court rolls of Lessingham have an entry, 15th
January, 1350, that only thirty shillings of tallage was demanded,
“because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage
had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence[272].”
Further research upon the records of the manor courts will doubtless show
that the experience of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lancashire
was not singular. From the Castle Combe rolls nothing has been extracted
as to the mortality in 1348-9, except one entry (Nov. 13, 1357) that a
certain tenement was ruinous, having remained in the lord’s hands since
the time of the pestilence for want of a purchaser; but it would be unsafe
to conclude that this sequestered manor of Wiltshire had not shared the
common fate. The accounts of certain manors in Hertfordshire were headed,
for thirty years after the Black Death, with a list of those who had
vacated tenancies by death in that pestilence[273]. A decayed inscription
cut in the stone of the parish church of Ashwell, in the same county,
records the great mortality of 1349 and the great tempest in January,
1362[274]. The tenants of the abbey of Meaux, in the Holdernesse division
of Yorkshire, were nearly all dead, as well as the monks within the
monastery walls. On the manor of Ensham, near Oxford, “there remained
hardly two tenants[275].”
The immediate effects of the great mortality were not so striking as might
have been supposed. Although it fell upon town and country in one terrific
blow, yet some places had recovered from it before others felt it; it was
over in Bristol (so far as we know) before it came to a height in London,
and nearly over in London before it began in York. The dead were
expeditiously buried in trenches; vacancies among the clergy were promptly
filled; the manor courts met and transacted business, and had their
records engrossed for the most part in the usual clerkly style. So great a
dislocation of society naturally gave rise to some irregularities:
stripping the dead is reported from one district in Norfolk, fights and
quarrels came into court more often than ever in 1349 and 1350, and we
read of two women who each had three husbands in as many months[276].
Knighton says that sheep and cattle were left to wander about untended,
and that they often perished in ditches by the wayside. A murrain occurred
the same year; at one place five thousand sheep died in the pasture and
were left to putrefy[277]. The price of a horse fell from forty shillings
to half a marc; a fat ox could be bought for four shillings, a cow for
twelve pence, a heifer for sixpence, a fat sheep for four pence, a stone
of wool for nine pence[278]. On the other hand, when the harvest of 1349
had to be gathered, the price of labour rose enormously. According to
Knighton, a reaper got eightpence a day, with his food, and a mower
twelvepence. The extant accounts tabulated by Thorold Rogers confirm the
contemporary statement: the rates for threshing the harvest of 1349 were
those of panic and compulsion, being unparalleled, whether before or
after, in the Eastern, Midland and Southern counties; the immediate effect
of the scarcity of hands was to nearly double the wages of labour for the
time being. Many villeins or bondsmen took the opportunity of escaping to
the towns or to distant manors, where they could make their own terms. Of
the last kind of incident, probably a very common one, we have an instance
recorded[279]: At an inquest, some years after the Black Death, upon
sundry manors near Oxford belonging to Christ Church, it was ascertained
that, “in the time of the mortality or pestilence, which was in the year
1349, there remained hardly two tenants in the said manor [Ensham], and
these had wished to leave, had not brother Nicholas de Upton, then abbot
of the said manor, compounded anew with them, as well as with other
tenants who came in.”
So far as regards the immediate effects of the great mortality. Its
after-effects, felt within a year or two, upon the economics and morals of
the country, upon the power of the old governing class, upon the
dispersion of industries and the new life of towns, upon the system of
farming, upon the development of the legal profession in London, and upon
various other things, are a much more intricate and disputable subject,
some part of which will be dealt with in the next chapter in connexion
with the subsequent history of plague or its domestication upon the soil
of England. Many things in England were noted as having happened “sithen
the Pestilence,” to quote the stock phrase of the ‘Vision of Piers the
Ploughman,’ and not the least of them was the frequent recurrence of
plague, or a prevalence of sickness so steady that the poet compares it to
the rain coming in through a leaky roof.
Some historians have doubted whether after all the Black Death made so
very much difference to the course of affairs[280]. It is perhaps
inevitable that scholars, accustomed to deal only with obvious human
causation, should look with some distrust upon the large claims made, in
the way of moral and social consequences, for a phenomenon which has been
apt to be classed with comets and earthquakes. The sudden thinning of the
population may indeed become a subject for economists without any regard
to the causation, and irrespectively of the means by which the numbers
were reduced; and that has been the only historic interest of the great
mortality hitherto. But the operation of pestilence is peculiar; the
thinning of the population is not effected as if in the due course of
nature; the analogy is closer with a decimating or exterminating war. The
invasion of the Black Death was part of the great human drama, just as if
a swarming people or a barbarous conqueror had been visibly present in it.
If things were moving in the fourteenth century towards a particular
issue, as historians find in their retrospect that they were, then the
coming of a great plague was part of that movement, organically bound up
with the other forces of it, and no more arbitrary than they. Thus it
becomes of interest to trace the antecedents of the Black Death before we
attempt to follow out its consequences; and it is not the less of interest
to do so, that the train of events leads us as far eastwards as the soil
of China, and to the incidents that attended the collapse of the greatest
government of the Middle Ages, the empire of the Great Khan.
The Antecedents of the Black Death.
When the Black Death in its progress westwards came to Constantinople in
1347, the emperor-historian, John Cantacuzenes, was present in his capital
to witness the arrival of the pestilence; in his history he wrote that it
came among them from the country of the hyperborean Scythians, that is to
say, the Tartars of the Crimea. The other contemporary Byzantine
historian, Nicephorus Gregoras, says that the pestilence began among the
Scythians in the Crimea and at the mouths of the Don. The Russian annals,
which are an independent source, and likely enough to have a correct
tradition, also say that the plague was God’s punishment on the people of
the Don territory and of several other localities with obsolete names,
including the famous city of Sarai on the Volga[281]. The Chersonese, and
the country from the Don to the Volga, or from the Euxine to the Caspian,
are the regions thus clearly indicated as the scene of the first outburst
of the Black Death; but there was no clue to its unaccountable appearance
there, or to the connexion between its outburst on the confines of Europe
and the distant home in the East which the rumour of the day vaguely
assigned to it. The more definite association of the Black Death with
China dates from 1757, when the abbé Des Guignes, in his _Histoire des
Huns_[282], took up the old tradition of the Arab historian, Aboel
Mahasin, that the plague began in Tartary, that the smell of corpses
spread on every side, that the infection passed from Cathay or Tartary to
the Tartars of the Kaptchac (Crimea), and from them to Constantinople and
Europe on the one hand, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and North Africa
on the other. He pointed out also that the overland caravan trade was a
ready means of transport for the infection. That which specially attracted
his attention as the historian of the Mongol power was the other statement
of the Arab historian in the same context, that China had been visited by
floods so disastrous that men, beasts, and even birds perished, and that
the country was almost depopulated. Upon that hint Des Guignes collected
from the Chinese annals of the first half of the fourteenth century a
considerable list[283] of calamities, which had actually happened--floods
causing the loss of millions of lives, earthquakes, and the like,
appending the catalogue without comment as a note to the text where he has
occasion to mention the Black Death. Des Guignes’ note was reproduced
verbatim by Hecker in his essay on the Black Death in 1832, and the
unwonted series of phenomena in China was made the basis of certain
mystical speculations as to the effect of earthquakes in causing a
“progressive infection of the zones,” a perturbation of “the earth’s
organism,” a “baneful commotion of the atmosphere,” or the like. In that
nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death
originating in China has remained to the present hour; the intuition of
the Peking Jesuit had merely been appropriated and set forth in his own
way by the German “Naturphilosoph[284].”
Meanwhile, in 1842 a clue to Des Guignes’ conjecture of a connexion
between the importation of the Black Death and the China land-route was
found (but not followed up) in the discovery by Henschel of a Latin
manuscript in the Rhediger Library at Breslau[285]. This was a narrative
compiled by one Gabriel de Mussis, a jurist of Piacenza, who had been
practising as a notary or advocate among the Genoese and Venetians trading
around the shores of the Euxine and Caspian, and had been an eyewitness of
the outbreak of the plague in that region. De Mussis has no theory of the
origin of the plague; he merely narrates the events as they unfolded
themselves before his own eyes; so much was he in the midst of them that
he was a passenger on board the very ship which brought the first seeds of
the Black Death direct from the Crimea to Genoa as early as the spring of
1347.
The substance of this story is that the Italian merchants, who were
then settled in considerable numbers at the various termini or
entrepôts of the overland trade from China and Central Asia by the
more northern route, were harassed by the Tartar hordes; that they had
stood a siege in Tana, on the Don, but had been driven out of it, and
had sought refuge for themselves and their merchandise within the
walls of Caffa, a small fortified post on the Crimean Straits (of
Kertch), built by Genoese not long before; that Caffa was besieged in
due course by the Tartar barbarians; that the investment lasted nearly
three years; that the merchants and others, crowded into the narrow
space within the walls, were put to great straits and could hardly
breathe, being only partially relieved by the arrival of a ship with
supplies; that the plague broke out among the besieging Tartar host
and daily destroyed thousands; that the Tartars threw the pestilent
dead bodies inside the walls by their engines of siege, so that the
infection took hold of those within the fort; that the Tartars
dispersed in panic and spread the infection all over the shores of the
Euxine, Caspian and Levant; that such of the Italian traders as were
able, De Mussis himself with them, escaped from Caffa in a ship; and
that the infection appeared in Genoa in its most deadly form a day or
two after the arrival of the ship, although none of those on board
were suffering from the plague.
These are all the circumstances related by De Mussis of the beginning of
the outbreak as known to himself at first hand: the rest of his narrative
is occupied with various incidents of the plague in Europe, with pious
reflections, and accounts of portents. His single reference to China is as
follows: “In the Orient, about Cathay, where is the head of the world and
the beginning of the earth, horrible and fearful signs appeared; for
serpents and frogs, descending in dense rains, entered the dwellings and
consumed countless numbers, wounding them by their venom and corroding
them with their teeth. In the meridian parts, about the Indies, regions
were overturned by earthquakes, and cities wasted in ruin, tongues of
flame being shot forth. Fiery vapours burnt up many, and in places there
were copious rains of blood and murderous showers of stones.” De Mussis
has certainly no scientific intention; nor can it be said that any
scientific use has been made of his manuscript since its discovery. For
Häser, its editor, merely reproduces in his history the passage from
Hecker on the three overland routes between Europe and the East, without
remarking on the fact that De Mussis definitely places the outbreak of the
plague at the European terminus of one of them: its remote origin is
involved in “impenetrable obscurity;” all we can say is that it came from
the East, “the cradle of the human race[286].”
But the entirely credible narrative by De Mussis of the outbreak of plague
at the siege of Caffa is just the clue that was wanting to unravel the
meaning of the widespread rumour of the time, that the plague came from
China. Let us first examine somewhat closely the source of that rumour. It
finds its most definite expression in an Arabic account of the Black Death
at Granada, by the famous Moorish statesman of that city,
Ibn-ul-Khatib[287]. Besides giving the local circumstances for Granada, he
makes various remarks on the nature of the plague, and on its mode of
spreading, which are not exceeded in shrewdness and insight by the more
scientific doctrines of later times. Its origin in China he repeats on the
authority of several trustworthy and far-travelled men, more particularly
of his celebrated countryman Ibn-Batuta, or “the Traveller,” whose story
was that the plague arose in China from the corruption of many corpses
after a war, a famine, and a conflagration.
The mention of Ibn-Batuta, as the authority more particularly, has a
special interest. That traveller was actually in China from 1342 to 1346.
In his book of travels[288] he tells us how on his way back (he took the
East-Indian sea-route to the Persian Gulf) he came at length to Damascus,
Aleppo and Cairo in the summer of 1348, and was a witness of the Black
Death at each of those places, and of the mixed religious processions at
Damascus of Jews with their Hebrew Scriptures and Christians with their
Gospels. But he says not one word anywhere as to the origin of the plague
in China, whence he was journeying homewards. He continued his journey to
Tangier, his birthplace, and crossed thence to Spain about the beginning
of 1350. At Granada he spent some days among his countrymen, of whom he
mentions in his journal four by name; but the most famous of them,
Ibn-ul-Khatib, he does not mention. However, here was Ibn-Batuta at
Granada, a year or two after the Black Death, discoursing on all manner of
topics with the most eminent Moors of the place; and here is one of them,
Ibn-ul-Khatib, in an account of the Black Death at Granada, quoting the
report of Ibn-Batuta that the pestilence arose in China from the
corruption of unburied corpses. None of the other statements of an Eastern
origin can compare with this in precision or in credibility; they all
indeed confuse the backward extension of the plague from the Euxine
eastwards to Khiva, Bokhara and the like, with its original progress
towards Europe from a source still farther east. The authority of
Ibn-Batuta himself is not, of course, that of historian or observer;
although he was in China during part, at least, of the national calamities
which the Chinese Annals record, he says nothing of them, and probably
witnessed nothing of them. But the traveller was a likely person to have
heard correctly the gossip of the East and to have judged of its
credibility; so that there is a satisfaction in tracing it through him.