ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO THE TUDOR PERIOD.
The great mortality came to an end everywhere in England by Michaelmas,
1349. The pestilence had lasted some fourteen months, from its first
appearance on the Dorset coast at the beginning of August, 1348, until its
subsidence in the northern counties in the autumn of 1349. It came to an
end, as all devastating epidemics do, through having spent its force,
exhausted its pabulum, run through all the susceptible subjects. A
letter-writer of Charles I.’s reign has put into colloquial language the
corresponding reason for a pause in the ravages of the plague towards the
end of its stay in London: “And I think the only reason why the plague is
somewhat slackened is because the place is dead already, and no bodie left
in it worth the killing[322].” The exhausted state of the country, and of
all Europe, is not easy for us to realize. Petrarch, a witness of the
Black Death in Italy, foresaw the incredulity of after ages, or their
inability to image the state of things--the empty houses, the abandoned
towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and
dreadful solitude over the whole world. If you inquire of historians, he
continues, they are silent; if you consult the physicians, they are at
their wits’ end; if you question the philosophers, they shrug their
shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the finger on the lip. Is it
possible that posterity can believe these things? For we who have seen
them can hardly believe them[323].
The blow fell upon every country of Europe within a period of two or three
years; and it must have paralysed all trade and industry, war and
politics, for the time being. Edward III.’s wars in France, which had
resulted in the victory of Crecy in 1346 and the conquest of Calais in
1347, had been suspended by a truce, which was renewed from time to time.
Thus, in the very midst of the pestilence, on the 2nd of May, 1349, the
envoys of the English and French kings, “in their tents between Calais and
Guines,” agreed upon a form of treaty continuing the truce until
Pentecost, 1350[324]. In the last days of 1349, Edward III. in person,
with a small force, was able to repel an attack upon his new possession of
Calais[325]. It was in the year after the Black Death (1350) according to
both Stow and Selden, that Edward III. held a great feast at Windsor, to
which his heralds invited knights from abroad, to celebrate the
institution of the Order of the Garter, the statutes of the Order having
been drawn up the year before. What is styled “the necessary defence of
the realm,” was a chief subject of concern throughout the year 1350. On
the 12th February an order was made to the sheriffs of counties for a
supply of so many arrows from each[326]. On the 20th March the mayors and
bailiffs of 110 towns are ordered to provide their respective quotas of
men-at-arms--London 100, Norwich 60, Bristol 20, and so on--and to send
them to Sandwich “for the necessary defence of our realm[327].” On the 1st
of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and
on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges.
On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the
piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to
Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were
routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous
engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed
in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the
ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties,
to raise men “for our passage against the parts over sea”--one to the
Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the
demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from
Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until
four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the
8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of
some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English
bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south
of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332]
and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two
thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with
which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet
of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot
under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on
the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various
reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster
crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight
ships[335].
Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality.
The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans
raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of
1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty
shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the
next six years. According to Avesbury’s calculation, Edward had a revenue,
from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he
says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336].
But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool
in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337].
Direct effects of the Black Death.
Meanwhile internal affairs were demanding the king’s attention, although
they occupy less space in the extant State papers than the warlike
preparations. On the 23rd August, while the mortality was raging in the
north, a proclamation was issued to the sheriff of Northumberland against
the migration of people to Scotland, with arms, victuals, goods and
merchandise, the pestilence not being mentioned[338]. The first State
paper which relates to the recent great mortality is the king’s
proclamation of 1st December, 1349, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich,
and of forty-eight other English ports, including London[339]. The
proclamation begins:
“Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our realm of England is
dead in the present pestilence, and the treasure of the said realm is
mostly exhausted, and (as we have learned) numbers of this our kingdom
are daily passing, or proposing to pass, to parts over sea with money
which they were able to have kept within the realm, Now we, taking
heed that if passage after this manner be tolerated, the kingdom will
in a short time be stripped both of men and of treasure, and so
therefrom grave danger may easily arise to us and to the said realm,
unless a fitting remedy be speedily appointed--do command the mayor
and bailiffs of Sandwich (and of forty-eight other ports) to stop the
passage beyond sea of them that have no mandate, especially if they be
Englishmen, excepting merchants, notaries, or the king’s envoys.”
The edict was probably directed more against the drain of treasure than
against the emigration of people; but this not uninteresting question
really belongs to other historians, who do not appear to have dealt with
it[340].
On the 18th of June, 1350, the first summer after the mortality, there was
issued the first proclamation, to the sheriffs of counties, on the demands
of the labourers and artificers for higher wages, entitled “De magna parte
populi in ultima pestilentia defuncta, et de servientium salariis proinde
moderandis[341].” The preamble or motive is one that cannot but seem
strange to modern ideas, although it must have been correct and
conventional according to feudal notions: “Forasmuch as some, having
regard to the necessities of lords and to the scarcity of servants, are
unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive wages, while others
prefer to beg in idleness, rather than to seek their living by labour--be
it therefore enacted that any man or woman, bond or free, under the age of
sixty, and not living by a trade or handicraft, nor possessing private
means, nor having land to cultivate, shall be obliged, when required, to
serve any master who is willing to hire him or her at such wages as were
usually paid in the locality in the year 1346, or on the average of five
or six years preceding; provided that the lords of villeins or tenants
shall have the preference of their labour, so that they retain no more
than shall be necessary for them.” It was strictly forbidden either to
offer or to demand wages above the old rate. Another clause forbids the
giving of alms to beggars. Handicraftsmen of various kinds are also
ordered to be paid at the old rate. Lastly, victuallers and other traders
are directed to sell their wares at reasonable prices[342]. The same
ordinance, with some added paragraphs, was reissued on the 18th November,
1350, to the county of Suffolk and to the district of Lindsey
(Lincolnshire), the latter being one of the chief sheep-grazing parts of
England; in those two localities, it is stated in so many words, the
labourers had set at nought the ordinance of 18th June[343]. When
Parliament met--for the first time since the mortality--on the 9th of
February, 1351, it was acknowledged that the commissions to sheriffs
issued by the king and his council had been ineffective, and that wages
had been at twice or thrice the old rate[344]. The Parliament, having
legislated for a number of technical matters in connexion with the
enormous number of wills and successions, proceeded next to the labour
question, and passed the famous Statute of Labourers, by which the
generalities of the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, are replaced by an
elaborate schedule of wages for harvest-time and other times[345]. One
clause of the Act is specially directed against the migration of labourers
to other counties. It was the ancient manorial system that was threatened
most of all by the depopulation. The surviving labourers sought work where
they could command the best wages, and at the same time could escape from
the few degrading bonds of servitude which still clung to the _nativi_ or
serfs of a manor. But the Manor Court was still the unit of government,
and the Act would have been inoperative except on that basis. That
fundamental intention of the statute of the 9th February, 1351, comes out,
not only in the explicit clause against migrations, but also by contrast,
in the special permission given to the labourers of the counties of
Stafford, Derby and Lancaster, to the people of Craven, and to the
dwellers in the Marches of Wales and Scotland, to go about in search of
work in harvest “as they were wont to do before this time[346].”
The immediate effect of the depopulation had been to mobilise, as it were,
the labouring class. Many of them must have taken the road at once; for,
in the first ordinance of 18th June, 1350, before the harvest of that year
had begun, it is stated that certain of the labourers preferred to live by
begging instead of by labour, and it is therefore forbidden to give alms
to beggars. According to Knighton, the effect of the ordinance itself was
to swell the ranks of the wandering poor; when some were arrested,
imprisoned, or fined in terms of the commission to the sheriffs, others
fled to the woods and wastes (_ad silvas et boscos_)[347]. These escapes
continued for years after; the rolls of the Manor Court of Winslow have
entries of many such cases long after the pestilence[348]. Many of these
fugitive villeins formed the class of “wasters,” often referred to in the
_Vision of Piers the Ploughman_: “waster would not work, but wander
about,” or he would work only in harvest, squander his earnings, and for
the rest of the year feel the pinch of hunger “until both his eyen
watered.” But it is clear that others went to distant manors, and settled
down again to steady employment, freed from their bonds as _nativi_; and
it cannot be doubted that some went to the towns[349].
In order to realize the causes and circumstances of the labour difficulty
after the enormous thinning of the population, it may be well to recall
the composition of the village communities. In each manor the arable land
was in two portions--on the one hand the immense open fields (two or
perhaps three) in which the villagers had each so many half-acre strips,
and on the other hand the lord’s demesne, or home-farm. Part of the latter
would often be let to free tenants, or even to villeins, who would count
for the occasion as free tenants. For the cultivation of his demesne the
lord was dependent on his tenants in villenage, who owed him, in form, so
many days’ work in the year, but in reality were often able to commute
their personal services for a money payment and are said to have done so
very generally[350]. Thus the lord of the manor was no longer able to call
upon his serfs to plough or to sow or to reap; he had to hire them for his
occasions. The free tenants would also be dependent to some extent upon
hired labour; and as some even of the villeins cultivated up to forty
acres or more, in the open fields of the manor, these would also have to
hire unless their families were old enough to help. All that labour for
hire would naturally be supplied by the poorer villagers, the cottars and
bordars, who would seldom cultivate more than a few half-acres, and in
some cases perhaps none[351]. The lower order of tenants in villenage
formed accordingly the class of labourers; and it was their demands which
gave occasion for the ordinances of 1350 and the statute of 1351. In each
manor the lord would have been affected more than all the rest by the
scarcity of labour, in respect of the extensive demesne or home-farm
managed by his bailiff. It is conjectured that he tried, in some cases, to
go back to his rights of customary service from his villeins, which had
gradually become commutable for rents paid in money, and that the attempts
to do so led to insubordination[352]. He had to pay wages, notwithstanding
all his rights of lordship. The wages paid in the harvest of 1349 were,
says Rogers, those of panic. In the form of petition which brought the
labour-question before Parliament in February 1351, it is stated that the
wages demanded were at double or treble the old rate; of the year
preceding (1350) it is recorded that the wages paid to labourers for
gathering the harvest on the manor of Ham, belonging to the lord Berkeley,
amounted to 1144 days’ work, on the old scale of commutation[353].
The labourers, although the lowest order on the manors, were accordingly
masters of the situation. Personal service to the lord, measurable merely
by days, and having no reference to fluctuations in the rate of wages, had
become obsolete; nor do the ordinance of 1350 and the statute of 1351 give
any hint of trying to revive it. If the men refused to be hired at the old
rate, they were to be arrested and imprisoned.
There were, of course, many things besides the statute, tending to keep
the majority of peasants on the manors where they had been born; so that
the formal abolition of villenage remained to be carried by rebellion in
1381, while many traces of it in practice remained for long after. Those
who stayed on their old manors, or removed to another county or hundred to
become tenants under new lords, were able to get permanently better wages;
the price of labour remained about forty per cent. higher than it had been
before the mortality; so that the statute was on the whole ineffective.
But another large proportion of the labouring class appears to have been
driven to a wandering life. It is not easy to explain on economical
principles why the class of “wasters,” of whom we hear so much, should
have been called into existence. Hands were scarce, and wages were high;
the conditions look on the surface to be entirely adverse to the creation
of a class of sturdy beggars and idle tramps. But the economic conditions
were really complex; and when all has been said on the head of economics,
there will remain something to be explained on the side of ethics.
Not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were cut off in
the mortality. A great part of the capital of the country passed suddenly
into new hands. Before the Parliament of 1351 legislated upon wages, it
was occupied with a number of technical difficulties about wills. Of the
proving of wills and the granting of letters of administration on a great
scale we have had an instance from an archdeaconry in Lancashire. In
Colchester, a town with some four hundred burgesses, one hundred and
eleven wills were proved[354]. In the Husting Court of London, three
hundred and sixty wills were enrolled and proved from 13th January, 1349,
to 13th January, 1350. An immense number of persons came into money who
could not all have had the inclination, even if they had the skill and
aptitude, for employing it as capital. If there were wasters among the
labourers, there were wasters also among the moneyed class. The mortality
produced, indeed, that demoralisation of the whole national life which has
been usually observed to follow in the like circumstances. “Almost all
great epochs of moral degradation are connected with great epidemics,”
says Niebuhr, generalizing the evidence which Thucydides gives specially
for the plague of Athens[355]. The fourteenth century was by no means a
period of high morality before the Black Death; but it was undoubtedly
worse after it. Langland’s poem of the vision of Piers the Ploughman is
one long diatribe against the vices of the age, and some of the worst of
them he expressly dates “sith the pestilence time.” It will be convenient
to take these ethical illustrations, before we proceed with the effects of
the mortality upon material prosperity and population, and with the
domestication of plague on the soil.
So far from the labouring class being the chief sinners, it is in the
humbler ranks that the root of goodness remains. Langland’s hero, the
Ploughman, is obviously chosen to represent “that ingenuous simplicity
and native candour and integrity,” which, as Burke says, “formerly
characterized the English nation,” and, one may add, have been at all
times its saving grace. It was in that class that the reforming movement,
led by Wyclif twenty years after, had its strength. Lollardy and the
Peasants’ Rebellion were closely allied. The grievance of the latter was
that the gulf between the gentleman and the workman had become wider than
in nature it should be. An ultimate and very indirect effect of the great
mortality was to strengthen the middle class by recruits from beneath; it
created the circumstances which produced the English yeoman of the
fifteenth century. But we are here engaged with the immediate effect; and
that was to broaden the contrast between the rich and the poor.
Luxury had already touched so high a point as to call for a statute
against extravagant living, the curious sumptuary law of 1336 which
prohibited many courses at table. Nothing could be more significant of its
later developments in London than the sarcastic description, which fills
an unusual space in one of the chroniclers, of the fantastic excesses of
dress and ornament among the male sex about the year 1362[356]. Some of
the names of the men’s ornaments occur also in Langland’s verses:
“Sir John and Sir Goffray hath a gerdel of silver,
A basellarde or a ballok-knyf with botones overgilt.”
These effeminate fashions actually led to a Statute of Dress in 1363, in
which also the lower class are forbidden to ape their betters. It is
perhaps to these hangers-on of wealth that Langland refers in his bitter
lines:
“Right so! ye rich, ye robeth that be rich | and helpeth them that
helpeth you, and giveth where no need is. | As who so filled a tun of
a fresh river | and went forth with that water to woke with Thames. |
Right so! ye rich, ye robe and feed | them that have as ye have, them
ye make at ease.”
But, as for the poor, Avarice considers them fair game:
“I have as moche pite of pore men as pedlere hath of cattes, | that
wolde kill them if he cacche hem myghte, for covetise of their
skynnes.”
In London the preaching clergy are accused of pandering to the avarice of
the rich:
“And were mercy in mean men no more than in rich | mendicants meatless
might go to bed. | God is much in the gorge of these great masters, |
but among mean men his mercy and his works. | Friars and faitours have
found such questions, | to plese with proud men sithen the pestilence
tyme, | and prechers at Saint Poules, for pure envye of clerkis, |
that folke is nought firmed in the feith ne fill of their goodes. |
... Ne be plentyous to the pore as pure charitye wolde, | but in
gayness and in glotonye forglotten her goode hem selve, | and breken
noughte to the beggar as the Boke techeth.”
The friars had lost altogether the enthusiasm of their early days:
“And how that friars followed folk that was rich, | and folk that was
poor at little price they set; | and no corpse in their kirk-yard nor
in their kirk was buried, | but quick he bequeath them aughte or
should help quit their debts.”
As for the monks, the same might have been said of them before; but now
more land had been thrown into their possession by the mortality:
“Ac now is Religion a ryder, a rowmer bi streetes,
A leader of love-days, and a lond-buyer,
A pricker on a palfrey fro manere to manere,
An heap of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were.
And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cup bringe,
He lowreth on hym, and axeth hym who taught hym curtesye.”
According to Langland’s poem, the country clergy left their livings and
came up to London:--
“Parsons and parish priests plained them to the bishop | that their
parishes were poor sith the pestilence time; | to have licence and
leave at London to dwell | and syngen there for simony, for silver is
sweet. | Bishops and bachelors, both masters and doctours, | that have
cures under Christ and crowning in token and sign, | that they should
shrive their parishours, preach and pray for them and the poor feed, |
live in London in Lent and all”--
some of them serving the king in the offices of Exchequer and Chancery,
and some acting as the stewards of lords.
It is undoubted that the business of the courts in London received a great
impetus after the mortality, as one can readily understand from the
number of inheritances, successions, and feudal claims that had to be
settled. Several of the Inns of Chancery date from about that time.
Gascoigne, who was “cancellarius” at Oxford about 1430, and had access to
the rolls of former “cancellarii,” was struck by the increase of legists
after the commotion of 1349: “Before the great pestilence there were few
disputes among the people, and few pleas; and, accordingly, there were few
legists in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford, at a time when
there were thirty thousand scholars in Oxford, as I have seen in the
rolls,” etc.[357]
The country clergy, such of them as remained in their cures were a
notoriously illiterate class; according to Knighton, they could read the
Latin services without understanding what they read. Langland makes a
parson confess his poor qualifications to be the spiritual guide of his
flock; on the other hand he was not without skill in the sports of the
field: “But I can fynde in a felde or in a furlonge an hare.” At one of
the manor courts in Wiltshire in 1361, a gang of the district clergy were
convicted of night poaching[358].
Such being the state of matters among the upper and middle classes, it is
not surprising to find a lax morality among the lower orders. The
ploughman is as severe a satirist of his own class as he is of the rich.
In London we have a picture of the interior of a tavern crowded with
loafers of all sorts “early in the morning.” In the country also the
contrast is drawn between the industrious and the idle class:
“And whoso helpeth me to erie [plough] or sowen here ere I wende |
shall have leve, bi oure Lorde to lese here in harvest, | and make him
merry there-mydde, maugre whoso begruccheth it: | save Jakke the
jogeloure and Jonet of the stewes, | and Danget the dys-playere, and
Denot the bawd, | and Frere the faytoure and folk of his order, | and
Robyn the rybaudoure for his rusty wordes.”
To live out of wedlock was nothing unusual:
“Many of you ne wedde nought the wimmen that ye with delen, | but as
wilde bestis with wehe worthen up and worchen, | and bryngeth forth
barnes that bastardes men calleth.”
Ill-assorted marriages also appear to have been common:
“It is an oncomely couple, bi Cryst, as me-thinketh, | to gyven a
yonge wenche to an olde feble, | or wedden any widwe for welth of hir
goodis, | that never shall bairne bere but if it be in armes. | Many a
paire sithen the pestilence have plight hem togiders: | the fruit that
thei brynge forth aren foule wordes: | in jalousye joyeles and
jangling in bedde | have thei no children but cheste and choppyng hem
betweene.”
Chapmen did not chastise their children. Old traditions of weather-lore,
and of reckoning the yield of harvest, were forgotten.
As a set-off to the uniformly bad picture of the times given by Langland,
we may turn to the gay and good-humoured scenes of the ‘Canterbury Tales.’
But Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the cultured class, and it is
proper to his muse to keep within the limits of a well-bred cynicism.
Again, Langland’s strictures on the avarice and other vices of the rich
may seem to be a mere echo of a very old cry, which finds equally strong
expression in Roger of Wendover, about the year 1235, and in Robert of
Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ in the year 1303. But the Vision of the
Ploughman is too consistent, and too concrete, to be considered as a mere
homily on the wickedness of the times, such as might have been written of
almost any age or of any country in which the Seven Mortal Sins were still
called by their plain names. The words “sithen the pestilence” recur so
often, that this contemporary author must be held as sharing the belief
that the Black Death made a marked difference to the morals of the nation
throughout all classes.
More lasting effects on Farming, Industries, and Population.
Turning from things moral to things material, we shall find that the Great
Mortality left its mark on the cultivated area of the country, on rents of
land, on the kind of tenure and the system of farming, on industry, trade
and municipal government, on the population, and, on what chiefly
concerns us, the subsequent health of the country.
Corn-growing would appear to have met with at least a temporary check.
Three water-mills near Shrewsbury fell in annual value by one half, owing
to the scarcity of corn to grind[359]. Richmond, one of the chief
corn-markets in Yorkshire, is said, on rather uncertain evidence, to have
been permanently reduced for the same reason; besides losing an enormous
number by the plague itself (vaguely stated at 2000), the town lost its
corn-trade through the land around falling out of cultivation, so that
some of the burgesses, being unable to pay rent, had to wander abroad as
mendicants[360].
The general statements of Knighton, Le Baker and others for England (not
to mention numerous rhetorical passages of foreign writers), to the effect
that whole villages were left desolate, are borne out by the petitions
recurring in the Rolls of Parliament for many years after. There are also
some references to the continuing desolateness of particular places, which
are probably fair samples of a larger number.
Thus a rich clergyman in Hertfordshire had given, just before the Black
Death, all his lands and tenements in Braghinge, Herts, to the prior and
convent of Anglesey, Cambridgeshire, in consideration that they should
find at their proper expense a chantry of two priests for ever in the
church of Anglesey, to say masses for the souls of the benefactor and his
family. But on the 10th of May, 1351, he remitted the charge and support
of one of the two said priests, on the ground that, “on account of the
vast mortality, lands lie uncultivated in many and innumerable places, not
a few tenements daily and suddenly decay and are pulled down, rents and
services cannot be levied, but a much smaller profit is obliged to be
taken than usual[361].” An instance of a long-abiding effect is that of
the manor of Hockham belonging to the earl of Arundel, which was not
tenanted for thirty years[362].
The history of rents is peculiar. The immediate effect, as we learn from
Knighton, as well as from the rolls of particular manor courts, was a
remission of them by the lords, lest their tenants in villenage should
quit the lands. There was, indeed, a competition among landlords for
tenants to occupy their manors, so that the cultivators could make their
own terms. Of that we have had an instance from the manor of Ensham,
belonging to Christ Church, Oxford[363]. But, after a few years, rents
appear to have come back to near their old level. The following figures
have been compiled from the Tower records of assizes made for the purpose
of taxation[364]:
1268 9_d._
1348-9 --
1417 6_d._
1446 8_d._
1271 12_d._
1359 9¼_d._
1422 4_d._
1336 11½_d._
1368 10½_d._
1429 4_d._
1338 11½_d._
1381 9¾_d._
1432 6_d._
The great fall, it will be seen, was in the next century.
Perhaps the most striking effect upon agriculture of the upheaval produced
by the great mortality was, as Thorold Rogers has shown, in changing the
system of farming and in creating the type of the English yeoman. The
system of farming the lord’s demesne or home-farm by a bailiff, never very
profitable, became, says that historian, quite unproductive, owing
especially to the permanent rise in wages. The small men who took the
lord’s land to farm--they had been doing so to some extent
before[365]--had not sufficient of their own for stock and seed; but they
got advances from the lord, which were repaid in due course. It was a kind
of _métairie_ farming. It prevailed for about fifty years, by which time
the ordinary system of farming on lease was becoming general. Finally, and
especially in the Civil Wars of the fifteenth century, much of the land
which had belonged in fee to the feudal lords, passed away by purchase to
the tenant farmers[366]. Thus arose the famous breed of English
yeomen--the “good yeomen whose limbs were made in England.”
The effect of the mortality upon trade and industry was, momentarily, to
paralyse them. Of the great wool-trade, Rogers, the historian of English
prices, says: “Nothing, I think, in the whole history of these prices is
more significant of the terror and prostration induced by the plague than
the sudden fall in the price of wool at this time. It is a long time
before a recovery takes place[367].” But from 1364 to 1380, the price of
wool was uniformly above the average; and, if there be any accuracy in
Avesbury’s figures already given for the years following 1355, the export
of bales of wool to the Continent (100,000 sacks in a year, he says, each
sack being a bale of the present colonial size, or weighing about three
hundredweights) meant a very considerable amount of labour, tonnage and
exchange. Among other articles of export, we hear specially of iron, in a
petition to Parliament of 28 Ed. III. (1354); the price of iron had risen
to four times what it was before the plague, and it was desired to stop
the export of it and to fix the price[368].
The effect of the mortality upon the industries of the country was shown
most in Norwich. That city was the centre of the Flemish cloth-weaving,
which had been flourishing in Norfolk for some twenty years, under the
direct encouragement of Edward III., and of a protective statute against
foreign-made cloth. Before the pestilence, Norwich was the second city in
the kingdom. In the king’s warrant for men-at-arms, which was indeed
issued in 1350, but may be taken as drawn up on the old lines and
irrespective of the pestilence, the quota of Norwich is rated at 60,
London’s being 100, Bristol’s and Lynn’s 20 each, that of Coventry,
Gloucester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Sarum, Oxford, Canterbury
and Bury St Edmund’s 10 each, and of other towns from 8 to 1 each, York
not being mentioned. But in the Subsidy Roll of 1377, which shows how many
persons, above the age of fourteen, paid the poll-tax of a groat in each
county and in each principal town, Norwich comes sixth in the list instead
of second, being far surpassed in numbers by York and Bristol, and
surpassed considerably by Coventry and Plymouth. So far from being in a
proportion to London of 60 to 100, it is now in a proportion of 3952 to
23,314, its whole population, as estimated, being 7410 against 44,770 in
the capital which at one time it bade fair to rival. It had lost heavily
in the Black Death, and so had the populous district around it, where the
Flemish industries and trade were planted in numerous villages. By 1368,
ten of the sixty very small parishes of Norwich had disappeared, and
fourteen more disappeared by degrees, the ruins of twenty of them being
still visible[369].
There is no mistaking the significance of these figures and facts for the
second city of the kingdom. At least one generation passed before Norwich
recovered something of its old prosperity. In the fifteenth century it was
still the chief seat of the woollen manufactures; the county of Norfolk
kept its old pre-eminence, although rival centres of industry had grown
up. There were, however, causes at work which at length reduced the
capital of East Anglia to a comparatively poor state. One of the
intermediate glimpses that we get of it--they are not many, even in
Blomefield’s history--is the statute of 1455, to put down the enormous
number of “pettifogging attorneys” in the city and county[370]. Its real
decline was in the early Tudor reigns. When Henry VII. visited Norwich in
1497, the mayor in presenting the Queen’s usual gold cup with a hundred
pieces in it, took occasion to tell the monarch “howbeit that they are
more poor, and not of such wealth as they have been afore these
days[371].” When the town suffered much from fires about the year 1505,
the city of London raised large sums in aid of its rebuilding. To the same
period belongs a municipal order that no one should dig holes in the
market-place to get sand, without the mayor’s licence. In 1525, there was
a general decay of work, the clothiers and farmers being unable to employ
the artisans and labourers, who began to rise in revolt against the heavy
taxes. An Act of 33 Hen. VIII. recites that the making and weaving of
worsteds is wholly decayed and taken away from the city of Norwich and
county of Norfolk--by the deceit and crafty practices of the great
multitude of regrators and buyers of the said yarn. These evidences of
decline in prosperity are in part long after the Black Death; but they
seem to have been continuous from that event.
So far as concerns the other large towns of England, they did not all fare
alike. The capital was more luxurious, and probably not less populous,
after the mortality than before it. The chancery and exchequer business
alone would have served to draw numbers to it; and we may be sure, from
all subsequent experience, that the gaps left by the plague were filled up
by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three
years. Nor does it appear from the poll-tax that York had suffered to
anything like the same extent as Norwich; while Bristol and Coventry
became towns of much greater consequence than before the plague. On the
other hand, Lincoln is described, in a petition for relief in 1399 (1 Hen.
IV.) as being “in the greater part empty and uninhabited.” In the same
year, Yarmouth has its houses “vacant and void,” although, in 1369, it is
said to have “gained so much upon Norwich” that it was made a seat of the
wool-staple. Other towns which figure in petitions to Parliament as
“impoverished and desolate of people,” are Ilchester (1407) and Truro
(1410). Camden instances the ancient borough of Wallingford, on the
Thames, as having been permanently reduced by the Black Death, although
the inhabitants, he says, traced the decay of the town to the diversion of
traffic over the new bridges at Abingdon and Dorchester[372]. Some parts
of Cambridge would appear to have borne the traces of the pestilence for a
number of years after. A charter of the bishop of Ely, dated 12 September,
1365, mentions that the parishioners of All Saints (on the north-east
side) are for the most part dead by pestilence, and those that are alive
are gone to the parishes of other churches; that the parishioners of St
Giles’s (the adjoining parish, near the Castle) have died; and that the
nave of All Saints is ruinous and the bones of dead bodies are exposed to
beasts; therefore the bishop unites All Saints and St Giles’s[373]. At
that time the churches of those parishes would have been small, perhaps
not much larger than the little church of St Peter still standing on the
high ground opposite to the great modern church of St Giles.
These instances of the chequered history of English towns subsequent to
the great mortality are not altogether favourable to the generality which
has been put forward by an able historian[374], that the great social
revolution produced by that event was to detach the people from the soil,
to drive them into the towns, to increase the urban population
disproportionately to the rural, to plant the germs of commerce and
industry, and to determine that expansion of England which became manifest
in the end of the Elizabethan period and under the Stuarts, the British
nation being “doomed by its economic conditions to take the course which
it has taken.” Many things happened between the Black Death and the
expansion of England. The fifteenth century intervened, which was in its
middle period, at least, distinguished as much by the rise of the yeoman
class as by the growth of trade guilds in the town. But that which mars
the generality most of all was the decline of industries and the decay of
towns (London and Bristol always excepted) in the reigns of Henry VII. and
Henry VIII.; the country had to recover from that before the Elizabethan
expansion,--before the nation began “to increase rapidly in population
until at length it should overflow the limits of its island home.”
At the same time, one effect of the great mortality was to mobilise the
class of agricultural labourers, and to drive a certain number of them
into the towns. Proof of that migration comes from the statutes and the
Rolls of Parliament.
An Act of 34 Edward III. (1360) imposes a fine of ten pounds to the
king on the mayor and bailiffs of any town refusing “to deliver up a
labourer, servant, or artificer” who had absented himself from his
master’s service, with a farther fine of five pounds to the lord. In
1376 the “Good Parliament” makes complaint that servants and labourers
quitted service on the slightest cause, and then led an idle life in
towns, or wandered in parties about the country, “many becoming
beggars, others staff-strikers, but the greater number taking to
robbing.” More direct evidence of industries diverting hands from farm
labour is found in the various statutes about apprentices. In the Act
of 12 Ric. II. (1388) it is provided that “he or she which use to
labour at the plough and cart or other labour or service of husbandry
till they be of the age of twelve years, shall abide at that labour
without being put to any mystery or handicraft; and if any covenant or
bond of apprentice be from henceforth made to the contrary, the same
shall be holden for none.” A more definite provision of the same kind
was made in 7 Hen. IV. (1405-6): “Notwithstanding the good statutes
aforemade, infants whose fathers and mothers have no land, nor rent,
nor other living, but only their service or mystery, be put to serve
and bound apprentices to divers crafts within cities and boroughs,
sometimes at the age of twelve years, sometimes within the said age,
and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs which
servants do use in the same” etc.--the result being that farm
labourers were scarce; therefore no one, not having land or rent of
twenty-shillings a year, to bind his son or daughter of whatsoever age
to serve as apprentice within any city or borough. In the 8th of Henry
VI. (1429) this statute was repealed so far as respected London, on
account of the hindrance which the said statute might occasion to the
inhabitants of that city[375].
It may be doubted if, after the Black Death, the towns underwent any
marked industrial development, except in such cases as Coventry and
Bristol. On the other hand, the cloth-weaving of East Anglia was dispersed
over the country, more particularly to the western and south-western
counties, so that the west of England gained an industrial character which
it retained until the comparatively modern rise of the cloth-industries of
Yorkshire and Lancashire. But it was in great part a development of
village industries upon the old manorial basis, as well as a migration of
labour to the towns.
We have an authentic instance, and probably a typical instance, in the
manor and barony of Castle Combe, of which the social history has been
pieced together from the rolls of its manor court by one of the earliest
students of that class of documents. Before the middle of the fifteenth
century this village situated among the Wiltshire hills, difficult of
access and almost secluded from the highways, had grown into a thriving
community of weavers, fullers, dyers, glovers, and the like, with their
attendant tradings and marketings, all upon its old manorial basis, and
with its old agriculture going hand in hand with its new industries. There
were free or copyhold tenants occupying their farms, while several
clothiers and occupiers of fulling-mills held farms also, “driving a
double and evidently a very thriving trade, accumulating considerable
wealth and giving employment to a large number of artizans who had been
attracted to the place for this purpose. Yet, strange to say, some of the
wealthiest and most prosperous of these tradesmen were still subject to
the odious bonds of serfship, adscript the soil[376].” It is clear,
however, that the jury of the manor court took care that the lord should
not have the best of it. The morals of this industrial village were, as
might have been expected, somewhat lax[377]. At the same time the removal
of nuisances was insisted upon by this self-governing community as
effectively, perhaps, as if it had been under the Local Government
Acts[378].
Another kind of effect than the industrial, upon the state of the towns,
is exemplified in the case of Shrewsbury. The dislocation of the old
social order had somehow touched the privileges and monopolies of
municipal corporations and guilds, and given power to a hitherto
unenfranchised class. The general question, besides being a somewhat new
one, is foreign to this subject; but the reference to Shrewsbury is given,
as the “late pestilence” is expressly connected with the municipal
changes. A patent of the 35th of Edward III. (1361), relating to the town
of Shrewsbury, recites the grievous debates and dissensions which had
arisen therein, “through the strangers who had newly come to reside in the
said town after the late pestilence, and were plotting to draw to
themselves the government of the said town[379].”
It has been conjectured that population in the country at large speedily
righted itself, according to the principle that population always tends to
come close to the limit of subsistence. But there is reason to think that
the means of subsistence were themselves reduced. We read of corn-land
running to waste, although most of the references to desolation are
perhaps to be taken as true for only one or two harvests following the
plague. Again, it is undoubted that sheep-farming and the pasturing of
cattle at length took the place of much of the old agriculture. It is not
easy to make out when the change begins; but there are instances of rural
depopulation as early as 1414[380], and the same had become a burning
grievance in the time of cardinal Morton and the early years of sir Thomas
More. It has been assumed, also, that the “positive checks” to population
had been taken off, when they ought in theory so to have been: that is to
say, after the inhabitants had been enormously thinned. The statement of
Hecker, that there was increased fecundity after the pestilence, appears
to be an instance of that author’s _a priori_ habit of mind[381]. What we
read in an English chronicle of the time is just the opposite, namely,
that “the women who survived remained for the most part barren during
several years[382].” The authority is not conclusive, but the statement is
in keeping with what we may gather from Langland’s poem as to ill-assorted
and sterile marriages, and as to illicit unions, which, as Malthus
teaches, are comparatively unfruitful. The alleged sterility is also in
keeping with, although not strictly parallel to, the experience of crowded
Indian provinces, such as Orissa, where a thinning of the population by
famine and disease has been statistically proved to be followed by a
marked decrease of fecundity. More direct evidence of a permanent loss of
people occurs a generation after the Black Death, at a time when the
circumstances of health were such as would explain it.
The poll-tax of 1377 was a means of estimating the population. The tax was
levied on every person, male or female, above the age of fourteen. In
estimating the population from the poll-tax returns, it is usual to add
one-fifth for taxable subjects who had evaded it, and to reckon the
taxable subjects above fourteen years as two-thirds of the whole
population. On that basis of reckoning, the population of the whole of
England, except Cheshire and Durham, in the year 1377 would have been
2,580,828 (or 1,376,442 who actually paid their groat each). The
population of the principal towns is calculated, in the second column of
the Table, from the numbers in the first column who actually paid the
poll-tax, according to the Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.
Laity assessed for the Poll-tax of 1377 in each of the following Towns,
being persons of either sex above the age of fourteen years.
--------------------------------------
| Taxed |Estimated
| |Population
------------------|--------|----------
London | 23,314 | 44,770
York | 7248 | 13,590
Bristol | 6345 | 11,904
Plymouth | 4837 | 9069
Coventry | 4817 | 9032
Norwich | 3952 | 7410
Lincoln | 3412 | 6399
Sarum | 3226 | 6048
Lynn | 3127 | 5863
Colchester | 2955 | 5540
Beverley | 2663 | 4993
Newcastle-on-Tyne | 2647 | 4963
Canterbury | 2574 | 4826
Bury St Edmunds | 2442 | 4580
Oxford | 2357 | 4420
Gloucester | 2239 | 4198
Leicester | 2101 | 3939
Shrewsbury | 2082 | 3904
Yarmouth | 1941 | 3640
Hereford | 1903 | 3568
Cambridge | 1722 | 3230
Ely | 1722 | 3230
Exeter | 1560 | 2925
Hull | 1557 | 2920
Worcester | 1557 | 2920
Ipswich | 1507 | 2825
Nottingham | 1447 | 2713
Northampton | 1447 | 2713
Winchester | 1440 | 2700
Stamford | 1218 | 2284
Newark | 1178 | 2209
Wells | 1172 | 2198
Ludlow | 1172 | 2198
Southampton | 1152 | 2160
Derby | 1046 | 1961
Lichfield | 1024 | 1920
Chichester | 869 | 1630
Boston | 814 | 1526
Carlisle | 678 | 1271
Bath | 570 | 1070
Rochester | 570 | 1070
Dartmouth | 506| 949
--------------------------------------
That this indirect census was taken on a declining population may be
inferred from the language of contemporaries. In the year of the poll-tax
(1377), Richard II. addressed certain questions to Wyclif concerning the
papal exactions of tribute; the reformer’s reply gives as the second
objection to the tribute “that the people decreases by reason of
(_praetextu_) the withdrawal of this treasure, which should be spent in
England[383].”
In the political poems of the time there are numerous references to the
pestilences and famines. One of these doggerel productions, “On the
Council of London,” 1382, contains a clear reference to a decrease of the
people:
“In nos pestilentia saeva jam crescit,
Quod virorum fortium jam populus decrescit[384].”
These general expressions in writings of the time will appear the more
credible after we have carried the history of plague and other forms of
epidemic sickness down through a whole generation from 1349.
The Epidemics following the Black Death.
Not the least of the effects of the Black Death upon England was the
domestication of the foreign pestilence on the soil. For more than three
centuries bubo-plague was never long absent from one part of Britain or
another. The whole country was never again swamped by a vast wave of
plague as in the fourteen months of 1348-49. Nor does it appear that the
succeeding plagues of the fourteenth century, the _pestis secunda_,
_tertia_, _quarta_ and _quinta_ were all of the same type as the first, or
otherwise comparable to it. Disastrous as many subsequent English
epidemics of bubo-plague were, they appear to have been localised in the
North, perhaps, or in Norfolk, or confined to the young; and, above all,
the bubo-plague became, in its later period, peculiarly a disease of the
poor in the towns, although it did not cease altogether in the villages
and country houses until it ceased absolutely in 1666. For three hundred
years plague was the grand “zymotic” disease of England--the same type of
plague that came from the East in 1347-49, continuously reproduced in a
succession of epidemics at one place or another, which, by diligent
search, can be made to fill the annals with few gaps, and, if the records
were better, could probably be made to fill most years. Britain was not
peculiar among the countries of Europe in that respect, although the
chronology of plagues abroad has not been worked out minutely, except for
an occasional province in which some zealous archaeologist had happened to
take up the subject[385].
From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was
scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing
is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the _pestis
secunda_, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the
same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the
chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the _pestis
puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of
several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and
Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This
recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken
as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of
a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising
generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been
born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed,
according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in
contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and
well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the
former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From
Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened
in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and
children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second
pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as
the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as
the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious
exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after
the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year
at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many
more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of
the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8
in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in
December.
The _pestis secunda_ is only one of a series of pestilences in the reigns
of Edward III. and Richard II., which the chroniclers number in succession
to the _pestis quinta_ in 1391. The entries in the annals are for the most
part so meagre and colourless that they give us no help in realizing the
share that a continuous infection in the soil, from the Black Death
onwards, may have had in bringing about the disastrous state of the
country in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Edward III. was
ruined in reputation by his French wars, and ended his long reign in
dishonour. His grandson Richard II. found the task of government too much
for him, and was deposed. The history of this period is not complete
without some account of the health of the country; a single line or
sentence in a chronicle, to mark the date of a _pestis tertia_ or _quarta_
or _quinta_, hardly does justice to the place of national sickness among
the events with which historians fill their pages. The graphic picture of
the times is ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ some passages of which
may help us to realize what the bare enumeration of second, third, fourth
and fifth pestilences meant. Some Latin poems of the time may be cited in
support; and for more particular evidence of the type of pestilence which
remained in England after the Black Death, we shall have to refer to
certain extant manuscript treatises, from the latter part of the
fourteenth century, which had been written in English to meet the wants of
the people.
The Latin poems of the time of Edward III. and Richard II. need only be
referred to so as to bring out by contrast the immense superiority of the
‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman.’ The poems of John of Bridlington, which
are the most considerable of the Latin series of verses, contain numerous
references to the epidemics of the time, both at home and abroad.
Curiously, he dwells more upon the effects of famine--flux and fever--than
upon the plague proper, which he nowhere distinguishes. Thus, of France
about the time of the Black Death:
“Destructis granis, deerit mox copia panis;
Poena fames panis, venter fluxu fit inanis.”
Or again, with specific reference to the _pestis secunda_ of 1361, which
we know to have been bubo-plague:
“... fluxus nocet, undique febris
Extirpat fluxus pollutos crimine luxus.”
Another reference, in the form of a prophecy, which from the context is
clearly to the pestilence of 1368-69, again dwells exclusively upon
famine:
“In mensis justi pandetur copia crusti:
Fundis falsorum premet arcta fames famulorum.”
followed by a note in Latin: “from which it appears that the poor in those
days were ill off for want of food[387].” One Latin poem of the end of the
fourteenth century is expressly “On the Pestilence,” in the following
manner:
“Ecce dolet Anglia luctibus imbuta,
Gens tremit tristitia sordibus polluta,
Necat pestilentia viros atque bruta.
Cur? Quia flagitia regnant resoluta[388].”
Turning to the far more real or observant work of the same date by
Langland, we find among his general references to sickness a most
significant one in which he compares it to the continual dropping of rain
through a leaky roof: “The rain that raineth where we rest should, be
sicknesses and sorrows that we suffer oft.” Again, in the allegory of
Conscience and Nature, the former makes appeal to Nature to come forth as
the scourge of evil-living:
“Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth
his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and
toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and
botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils--foragers of Nature
had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose
their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the
banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with
many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So
Nature through corruptions killed many. Death came driving after, and
all to dust dashed kings and knights, kaisers and popes, learned and
lewd, he let no man stand that he hit even, that ever stirred after.
Many a lovely lady, and lemans of knights, swooned and swelted for
sorrow of Death’s dints.”
But “Conscience of his courtesy to Nature he besought, to cease and
suffer and see whether they would leave pride privily and be perfect
Christens. And Nature ceased then, to see the people amend. Fortune
gan flatter those few that were alive, and promised them long life;
and Lechery he sent among all manner men, wedded and unwedded, and
gathered a great host all against Conscience[389].”
Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite
which Nature had given was of no real avail.
A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where
the pope’s exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his
English tribute:
“Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill
That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence,
And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy.
For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had,
He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh.”
Among the other consequences “sithen the pestilence,” was this: “So is
pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that
prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death
withdraw not their pride.”
The _pestis secunda_ of 1361, or _pestis puerorum_, may perhaps be pointed
to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children,
“ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted
marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the
second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially,
and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390],
may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that
pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious
reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class,
“whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their
husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their
awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of
low degree and low reputation[391].”
Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,”
means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second,
third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the
pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles;
there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after
the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly
associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of
famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the
sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a
chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same
chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was
confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the
epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great
mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of
the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before,
1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,”
or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore,
to conclude that all the outbreaks of _pestis_ in England subsequent to
the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in
Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning
agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and
pestilences--by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant.
_Pestis_, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period,
just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some
may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all
among the _pestes_ of the generations following. Positive evidence of the
continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not
superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in.
Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague.
The plague was called “the botch” down to the Elizabethan and Stuart
periods; and the “botches” in Langland’s poem, or, as he writes it,
“boches,” were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which
had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after
time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear
proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the
fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention
and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear
the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in
comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of “a great
Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords,
for pestilence[395]”; from which it may be concluded that this, the
commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used
in the text are “pestilence” and “pestilential sores,” and the handling of
the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains
exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to
believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to
the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to
business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know--and this,
be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and
circumstances:
“Wherefore they that have not dronken of that swete drynke of
Astronomye may putte to these pestilentiall sores no fit remedies;
for, because that they know not the cause and the quality of the
sickness, they may not hele it, as sayeth the prince of physic
Avicenna: ‘How shouldest thou hele a sore and yknowe not the cause?’
He that knoweth not the cause, it is impossible that he hele the
sickness.”
If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of
Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he
corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the
_Canterbury Tales_. Chaucer’s doctor of physic stands for the
well-grounded practitioner of the time--“grounded in astronomie,” it is
true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the
charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably
knew no Latin, to say nothing of “astronomy,” and therefore knew not how
to let a patient die (or recover) _secundum artem_. The doctor of physic
uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux,
that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to
have condensed it into the two following lines:
“The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote,
Anon he gave to the sick man his bote.”
It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which
he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was;
“And yet he was but easy of dispense;
He kept that he wan in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial:
Therefore he loved gold in special.”
This is John of Burgoyne all over; it would have been an anachronism in
England by more than two hundred years to have represented a physician as
caring for any but paying patients, or as regarding an epidemic sickness
from any other point of view than as a source of income.
Besides the “ordinance” of John of Burgoyne, which may be assigned to the
reign of Richard II., there was another essay on the plague circulating in
England in an English translation, of which the copy among the Sloane
manuscripts is assigned to the fourteenth century[397]. The importance
attached to this manuscript work is shown in the fact that it was chosen
among the very first to be printed at an English press, probably in the
year 1480[398]. It was reprinted in 1536, and the substance of it was
copied into nearly all the English books on plague (from one to another)
as late as the seventeenth century, much of its original matter passing
under the name of one Phaer, or Phayre or Thayre, who was a compiler about
the middle of the sixteenth century. Writers on early English printing
have made much of the printed book of 1480; but they do not appear to have
known of the manuscript which was used as the printer’s “copy[399].” If
one happens to use the latter first, and comes later to the printed book,
he will observe the identity not merely in the words and spelling but even
in the very form in which the type had been cut. The authorship of a
manuscript which is thus invested with a various interest may deserve a
few lines of inquiry.
The author of it describes himself in the (translated) introduction as “I
the bisshop of Arusiens, Doctour of phisike,” that is to say, bishop of
Aarhus, in Denmark. In the text, he claims to have practised physic at
Montpellier:
“In the Mount of Pessulane I might not eschewe the company of people,
for I went from house to house, because of my poverty, to cure sick
folk. Therefore bread or a sponge sopped in vinegar I took with me,
holding it to my mouth and nose, because all aigre things stoppen the
ways of humours and suffereth no venomous thing to enter into a man’s
body; and so I escaped the pestilence, my fellows supposing that I
should not live. These foresaid things I have proved by myself[400].”
The fact that this medieval treatise, whatever its exact date, was turned
into English and circulated in manuscript, and that it was chosen for
printing almost as soon as English printing began, in the reign of Edward
IV., is sufficient evidence, if more were needed, that the English had to
reckon with bubo-plague as one of their standing diseases throughout the
latter part of the medieval period. Before we come to the chronology of
English plagues in that period, from the Black Death to the accession of
the Tudor dynasty in 1485, it will be convenient to consider here, with
the help of the above treatise, how the endemic plague was viewed in those
days,--what it was ascribed to in its origin, in its incidence upon houses
and persons, and in its propagation, what was advised for its avoidance or
prevention, and what was prescribed for its treatment. As the bishop’s
essay was the source of most that was taught on these matters in England
for the next two or three hundred years, it will be an economy to give a
brief account of it here once for all.
The remote causes, or warnings of the approach of pestilence, are given
under seven heads, including the kind of weather, swarms of flies,
shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning out of the south, and winds
out of the south; this list was reproduced, with little or no change, by
the Elizabethan writers of popular health-manuals. The second section of
the essay is on the “causes of pestilence.” There are three causes:--
“Sometime it cometh from the root beneath; other while from the root
above, so that we may feel sensibly howwith change of the air
appeareth unto us; and sometime it cometh of both together, as well
from the root above as from the root beneath, as we see a siege or
privy next to a chamber, or of any other particular thing which
corrupteth the air in his substance and quality, which is a thing may
happen every day. And thereof cometh the ague of pestilence (and about
the same many physicians be deceived, not supposing this ague to be a
pestilence). Sometimes it cometh of dead carrion, or corruption of
standing waters in ditches or sloughs and other corrupt places. These
things sometime be universal, sometime particular.” Then follow
sentences on the “root above” which are somewhat transcendental. When
both “roots” work together, when, by “th’ ynp‘ffyons[401]” above, the
air is corrupt and by the putrefaction or rotten carrion of the vile
places beneath,--an infirmity is caused in man. “And such infirmity
sometimes is an ague, sometimes a posthume or a swelling, and that is
in many things. Also the air inspired sometimes is venomous and
corrupt, hurting the heart, that nature many ways is grieved, so that
he perceiveth not his harm....
“These things written before are the causes of pestilence. But about
these things, two questions be mooted. The first is, wherefore one
dieth and another dieth not, in a town where men be dead in one house
and in another house there dieth none. The second question is, whether
pestilence sores be contagious.
“To the first question, I say it may hap to be of two causes: that is
to say, of that thing that doth, and of that thing that suffereth. An
ensample of that thing that doth: The influence of the bodies above
beholdeth that place or that place, more than this place or this
place. And one patient is more disposed to die than another. Therefore
it is to be noted that bodies be more hot disposed, of open pores,
than bodies infect having the pores stopped with many humours. Where
bodies be of resolution or opening, as men which abusen them selfe
with wymmen, or usen often times bathis; or men that be hot with
labour or great anger--they have their bodies more disposed to this
great sickness.
“To the second question I say, that pestilence sores be contagious by
cause of infect humoures bodies, and the reek or smoke of such sores
is venomous and corrupteth the air. And therefore it is to flee from
such persons as be infect. In pestilence time nobody should stand in
great press of people, because some man of them may be infect.
Therefore wise physicians, in visiting sick folk, stand far from the
patient, holding their face toward the door or window. And so should
the servants of sick folk stand. Also it is good to a patient every
day for to change his chamber, and often times to have the windows
open against the North and East, and to spar the windows against the
South. For the south wind hath two causes of putrefaction. The first
is, it maketh a man, being whole or sick, feeble in their bodies. The
second cause is, as it is written in the Third of Aphorisms, the south
wind grieveth the hearing and hurteth the heart, because it openeth
the pores of man and entereth into the heart. Wherefore it is good to
an whole man in time of pestilence, when the wind is in the South, to
keep within the house all the day. And if it shall need a man to go
out, yet let him abide in his house till the sun be up in the East
passing southward.”
These explanations of the incidence of plague are in part repeated in the
section of the essay where the author gives directions for avoiding it.
After enjoining penance, he proceeds:
“It is a good remedy to void and change the infect place. But some may
not profitably change their places. Therefore as much as to them is
possible, it is to be eschewed every cause of putrefaction and
stinking, and namely every fleshly lust with women is to be eschewed.
Also the southern wind, which wind is naturally infective: therefore
spar the windows, etc. Of the same cause, every foul stink is to be
eschewed--of stable, stinking fields, ways, or streets, and namely of
stinking dead carrion; and most of stinking waters, where in many
places water is kept two days or two nights, or else there be gutters
of water casten under the earth which caused great stink and
corruption. And of this cause some die in that house where such things
happen, and in another house die none, as it is said afore. Likewise
in that place where the worts and coles putrefied, it maketh noifull
savour and stinking. For in like wise as by the sweet odour of bawme
the heart and spirits have recreation, so of evil savours they be made
feeble. Therefore keep your house that an infect air enter not in. For
an infect air most causeth putrefaction in places and houses where
folk sleep. Therefore let your house be clean, and make clear fire of
wood flaming: let your house be made with fumigation of herbs, that is
to say, with leaves of bay-tree, juniper, yberiorgam--it is in the
apothecary shops--wormwood etc.... For a little crust corrupteth all
the body.
“Also in the time of the pestilence it is better to abide within the
house; for it is not wholesome to go into the city or town. Also let
your house be sprinkled, specially in summer, with vinegar and roses,
and with the leaves of vine tree. Also it is good to wash your hands
ofttimes in the day with water and vinegar, and wipe your face with
your hands, and smell to them. Also it is good always to savour aigre
things.”
Then follows his own Montpellier experience, already quoted.
The diagnostics come in casually along with the treatment:
“But some would understand how may a man feel when he is infect. I say
that a man which is infect, that day eateth not much meat for he is
replenished with evil humours; and forthwith after dinner he hath lust
to sleep, and feeleth great heat under cold. Also he hath great pain
in the forehead.... He shall feel a swelling under the arm, or about
the share, or about the ears.... When a man feeleth himself infect, as
soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then
stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth
venom.”
Then follow directions for bleeding, according to the position of the
bubo--in the armpit, groin or neck, the direction “if on the back”
probably having reference to the carbuncle[402]. The section on treatment,
which is the last, ends with a prescription for a medicine “that the
sooner a swelling be made ripe.”
These are sufficiently clear indications of the bubonic nature of the
disease called pestilence. At the same time the writer includes an ague as
also pestilential, due to similar causes and arising on similar occasions.
This is a use of the name ague which should not be mistaken for its common
application to intermittent fever. Ague was simply (febris) acuta; and
pestilential ague was a name for typhus fever in the sixteenth century (as
in Jones’ _Dyall of Agues_), as well as in Ireland until a much later
period. This early association of acute pestilential fever with true
bubo-plague means the same relationship of typhus to plague which was
systematically taught by Sydenham, Willis, and Morton in the seventeenth
century; typhus in their time was the frequent attendant of plague,--a
_pestis mitior_; and it would appear to have been its attendant and
congener in the fourteenth century also.
The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued.
Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the _pestis
tertia_--that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a
“great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403],” and it appears to
have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of
that scarcity which Langland’s poem refers to the month of April, 1370:
Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres
And louren whan thei lakken hem.--It is nought longe passed,
There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne
With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe
And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe
In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille,
A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten
My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404].
The _pestis_ of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness;
but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On
the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to
be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the
opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and
1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high
prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as “the grete dere
yere[405].” But the _pestis tertia_ appears to have been most severe in
the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of
Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the
pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased
London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such
numbers as in the _pestis secunda_ of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the
cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual
mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or
may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369,
the second year of the epidemic[408].
There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease,
and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of
the dry April, 1370, to which Langland’s verses relate. This evidence lies
in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of
1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409].
In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the
carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish,
within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks
of the water of Thames near to Baynard’s Castle, where there was a jetty
for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that
divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of
traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and
smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same
nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering
to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is
differently stated: “Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of
slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown
into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly
corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and
stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have
befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:--We,
desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the
decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people” etc.
Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to
the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of
1362 begs the king “to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his
commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and
beasts”--the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th
January, 1362, “on Saturday at even,” which was long remembered, and is
commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the
church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that
“pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs”--manors and
tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In
1369 a petition states that “the king’s ferms [rents] in every county of
England are greatly abated by the great mortalities.” The parliament of
1376, the “good Parliament” so-called, is able to point the moral of its
petitions by frequent references to the pestilences “that have been in the
kingdom one after another,” the pestilences “of people and servants,” the
murrains of cattle, and “the failure of their corn and other fruits of the
earth.” The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II.
in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of
his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy
subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted.
The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the
greater sort. The author of the _Eulogium_ reckons it the _pestis tertia_
(passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there
was “grandis pestilentia” both in England and other countries, an infinity
of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, “at the
instance of the cardinal of England” granted plenary remission to all
dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an
epidemic of true bubo-plague,--probably the _pestis quarta_ correctly
so-called[411].
In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were
stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following
prayer on their lips: “God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew
scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that
Ynglessh men dyene upon”--foul death being the name given to plague also
in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of
1379-80, that the king would “consider the very great hurt and damage
which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and
by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413].”
In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of
Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the
pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain
of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can
hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring
effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has
two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground
of “the great poverty and disease” of the commons, through pestilence of
people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This
was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles
of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority,
enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of
the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In
London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been “chiefly among boys and
girls[416].” A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the
earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the
Peasant’s Rebellion but also “the pestilens[417].”
The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by “foetid
fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air”: from eating of the
spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and
infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other
parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the
sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419].
This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in
‘Piers Ploughman,’ when the poor people thought to “poison Hunger” by bad
food.
The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so
serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called
the _pestis quinta_ by two annalists[420], and is described not without
some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready
to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389,
the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men
prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst
came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until
September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse
parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more
young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans
entry confirms this: “A great plague, especially of youths and children,
who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive
numbers[423].” After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have
special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the
year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and
aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time
of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of
dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable
care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea.
In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the
Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with
bubo-plague. At York “eleven thousand” were said to have been buried[425].
Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West,
and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one
annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, “on the
pestilence setting in[427].” The next evidence comes from the Rolls of
Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is
presented “that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence
which is in the northern parts,” and send sufficient men to defend the
Scots marches.
The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls
somewhere between 1405 and 1407. “So great pestilence,” says the St Albans
annalist, under the year 1407, “had not been seen for many years.” In
London “thirty thousand men and women” are reported to have died in a
short space; and “in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon
the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a
numerous family were left almost empty[428].” But it is under the 7th of
Henry IV. (1405) that Hall’s chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the
city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in
Essex, and so to Plashey, “there to pass his time till the plague were
ceased” (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly
in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a
petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues “because the
town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are
unable to pay the said ferme,” and for the cancelling of all arrears due
since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV.
(1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent “that the said town is
impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss
by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default
of inhabitants in the said town”--a petition apparently similar in terms
to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry
IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and
Yarmouth; the former was “in great part empty and uninhabited,” while the
latter had “its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other
things.”
For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that “numbers of Englishmen were
struck by plague and ceased to live[429].” A single chronicler mentions a
pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear
undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about
the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of “great
numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which
have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used
to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of
position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves”; the enemy
were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year
(9 Henry V.) states that “both by pestilence within the realm and wars
without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of
sheriff[432].” That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of
France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The
horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets
of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in
that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the
Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed
furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or
occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century,
including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good
reason to suppose that fevers or other _morbi miseriae_, were rife among
the common people, least of all among the peasantry.
The Public Health in the Fifteenth Century.
Our safest indications are got from the prices of commodities and the
rates of wages, and these, according to the most competent authority,
Thorold Rogers, were more favourable to the working class in the fifteenth
century than at other periods: “As the agriculturist throve in the
fifteenth century, so the mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous.
This was the age in which the property of the guilds was generally
acquired.” On famines in particular, I shall quote one other passage,
which entirely confirms the view that I had independently stated in the
first chapter when speaking of Ergotism:
“Famine, in the strict sense of the word, has rarely occurred in
England, owing to the practice which the inhabitants of this island
have persistently maintained of living mainly on the dearest kind of
corn.... The people lived abundantly, and, except when extraordinary
scarcity occurred, regularly on the best provision which could be
procured[434].”
One such period of extraordinary scarcity all over England fell in the
years 1438-39. The chronicle of Croyland says that there were three wet
harvests in succession, that famine had been almost constant for two
years, and that the people were reduced to eating dried herbs and
roots[435]. That would have been a famine of the old kind, like those of
1258 and 1315, wheat having touched 20_s._ But it should not lead us to
suppose that the disastrous period of the end of Edward III.’s reign and
of the reign of Richard II. was continued throughout the fifteenth
century. It is true that the records of that century are scantier than for
earlier periods; the monastic chronicles have all ceased, except those of
St Albans and Croyland, and the citizens’ diaries, which took their place,
have hardly begun. It is possible that a fuller record would have shown a
greater prevalence of distress throughout the country. It is probably
owing to the scantiness of the history that the views of the fifteenth
century range from the extreme of optimism to the extreme of pessimism.
Where little is known, much may be imagined. Thus, a recent writer on
_England in the Fifteenth Century_[436], says that “all attempts to
specify the years of scarcity would only mislead”; and again: “There is
hardly any period of five years during that time [15th century] without
these ghastly records.” Another recent writer[437] remarks upon the
fifteenth century being called a time of rude plenty, and sets against
that “the famines, the plagues, the skin-diseases, the miserable quality
of the food, the insecurity of life and property, the hovels in which the
people lived, and the tyranny and oppression of a time of unsettled
government.” It is needless to controvert the merely subjective impression
in an author’s mind. But, in order to clear our ideas, let us take these
things one by one. What were firstly the famines? There is no great one
but that of 1438-39, which was due to a succession of wet harvests, and
was equally severe in Scotland and in France, having in them caused
famine-sickness as well as plague. Of the plagues, which were certainly no
worse than in the Elizabethan and Stuart times, I shall speak in detail
almost at once. Of the skin-diseases, there is nowhere a word said:
another writer[438] specifies leprosy as afflicting England “all over the
country” in the fifteenth century, whereas it can be shown that the
prevalence of that disease, such as it had ever been in England, had
almost ceased, and its sentimental vogue passed, in the reign of Edward
III. The miserable quality of the food and the wretched hovels have
certainly no special relevancy to the period[439]; on the contrary, the
picture that we get of the manor of Castle Combe in the fifteenth century
is that of a prosperous community, although not a highly moral one. As to
insecurity of life and property, and oppression of government, there seems
to be some illusion because the time was that of the wars of York and
Lancaster. But we have the significant observation of Philip de Comines, a
contemporary French statesman who kept his eye on the state of other
countries; writing of the effects of civil war, he says:--
“England has this peculiar grace that neither the country, nor the
people, nor the houses are wasted or demolished; but the calamities
and misfortunes of the war fall only upon the soldiers and especially
the nobility, of whom they are more than ordinarily jealous: for
nothing is perfect in this world.”
The truth seems to be that the middle part of the fifteenth century was
really the time “ere England’s woes began, when every rood of ground
maintained its man,” and that the Golden Age came to an end as soon as the
dynastic and aristocratic quarrel was ended, and the nobles left free to
turn their attention to their lapsing feudal rights. It is then that we
begin to hear of enclosures, of adding house to house and field to field,
of huge sheep-farms with no labourers on the soil, and of deserted
villages. Goldsmith meant it of his own time; but Auburn flourishing
belonged to the fifteenth century, and Auburn deserted was a common
English experience in the time of Henry VIII. It is just because the
fifteenth century is bounded on either side by periods of known distress
among the commons, and is itself without a history, that one thinks of it
as happy; and that view of it is borne out by the economic history which
has been laboriously constructed for it.
So much being premised of the country’s well-being at large, we may now
return to the particular records of epidemics of plague.
Chronology of Plagues in the Fifteenth Century.
With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all
over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I
shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the
sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of
plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that
rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did
not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under
the year 1431, has an entry of “pestilence at Codycote and divers places
of this domain in this year.” Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament
contain a petition to the king “how that a sickness called the Pestilence
universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been
usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the
presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and
wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as
experience daily showeth”--therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the
king in doing knightly service, “and the homage to be as though they
kissed you.” That may have been a plague both of town and country during
famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as “Walsingham”
expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as
in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and
more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is
for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years
between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of
plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots,
which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating
the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The
disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may
safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences
thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One
significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of
Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the
monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection
from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of
chronic diseases, 29. “Pestilence” appears to mean specifically
bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths
from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately _propter
infexionem_. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would
be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the
first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And
that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in
the same record, to have lost “only four” out of a membership of about
eighty[441].
It remains to enumerate briefly the known instances of plague in London or
other towns, from the last date given (1420) down to the beginning of the
Tudor period (1485). Its prevalence “in England,” but more probably in
London only, in 1426, comes out in a letter from the Senate of Venice
cautioning the captain of the Flanders galleys and the vice-captain of the
London galleys[442]. We hear also of that plague in London owing to the
fact that certain Scotsmen of rank, hostages for the ransom of the king of
Scots, died of the plague in London. An envoy who proceeded to Scotland on
12th March, 1427, was instructed to ask that the dead hostages be replaced
by others of equal rank; and if the king of Scots objected on the ground
that they had died because they had been kept in places where the late
pestilence raged, notwithstanding their request to be removed, the envoy
was to say that the hostages had been kept in London, where the dukes of
Bedford and Gloucester and all other lords of the Council remained during
the time; and that the hostages were “neither pinned nor barred up” in any
house, but went at large in the city, and might have taken any measures
they pleased for their own preservation. It appears, however, that the
council removed from the city, and that the courts were adjourned, at a
stage of the epidemic subsequent to the deaths of the Scots. The last plea
of the envoy was that, supposing the pestilence had prevailed throughout
England, the king was not therefore bound to send the hostages out of
England; from which hypothetical construction, we may conclude that the
epidemic was special to London--one of a long series requiring the king’s
Court, the Parliament, and the Law Courts to be adjourned[443].
In 1433, the Parliament which met at Westminster on the 8th July, was
prorogued on the 15th August, on account of the _gravis pestilentia_ which
began to arise in London and the suburbs[444]. A London chronicler enters,
under the 12th of Henry VI. (1433) “a grete pestilence and a grete frost,”
a conjunction that would be interesting if the hard winter had
preceded[445]. The plague revived in London in the following autumn; for,
on the 27th October, 1434, the Privy Council ordered all pleas then
pending to be continued from the morrow of All Souls to the octaves of St
Hilary on account of the epidemic[446]. After three years, in 1437, the
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas paid a visit to St Albans Abbey and
remained there some time, “on account of the epidemic plague which was
then reigning in the city of London[447].” Two years after, 1439, comes
the entry in the Rolls of Parliament, already quoted, with reference to
omitting the ceremony of kissing the king, because “a sickness called the
Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than
hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most
infective[448].” Thus we have in the decade from 1430 to 1440 no fewer
than four distinct outbreaks of plague, three of them confined to the city
of London, and one of them, that of 1439, general throughout the realm.
The last was “a sickness called the pestilence,” which should mean the
bubo-plague. The year was one of great distress abroad, many thousands
having died in Paris. It was a year of famine in Scotland, where the
disease was undoubtedly dysentery in part; but the information from
Scotland (given in the sequel) points to the true plague supervening on
the other. There was famine in England at the time when it was in France
and in Scotland, so that the type of sickness may have been, in England
also, fever and dysentery first and plague afterwards.
In 1444, on the 5th of June, the Rolls contain the entry that grave
pestilence began to arise. A severe pestilence is reported at Oxford in
1448[449]. On the 30th May, 1449, Parliament is adjourned to Winchester
to avoid “the corrupt and infected airs” of Westminster. On the 6th
November of the same year it adjourns to Ludgate, in the city of London,
owing to the infection of the air in Westminster. The infected state of
Westminster and other places around is again the subject of an entry on
the 4th December, with this addition: “it has been sufficiently decreed as
to avoiding and extinguishing the said corrupt and infectious air.” About
three months later, on 30th March, 1450, Parliament adjourns to Leicester
on account of the insalubrity of the air at Westminster. In 1452 it
adjourns on 20th November to Reading for the same reason, but is soon
after adjourned to the 11th February, owing to plague in Reading
itself:--“de magna mortalitate in dicta villa de Redyng jam regnante.”
These years must have been a really severe plague-period, for we find in
1454, a reference in the Paston Letters to the alarm caused by the plague
in London. Wm. Paston writes to John Paston, 6 September: “Sergeant-at-law
Billing came to London this week. He sent for me and asked me how I fared.
I told him, here is pestilence, and said I fared the better he was in good
hele, for it was noised that he was dead.... Here is great pestilence. I
purpose to flee into the country[450].”
From 1454 (and the year following in Scotland) there is a clear interval
of ten years without mention of plague in the not very complete records of
the time. With the year 1464 there began a series of outbreaks of plague
which appear to have lasted in one part of the country or another with few
intermissions until 1478. This plague-period is said to have been foretold
in a remarkable prophecy. In the year 1462 a boy at Cambridge, while
walking in a lane between King’s College and the adjoining buildings of
Clare and Trinity Halls, met an old man with a long beard, who addressed
him thus: “Go now and tell to anyone that within these two years there
will be such pestilence, and famine, and slaughter of men, as no one
living has seen.” Having said this he disappeared. Doubts however, were
at once thrown on the reality of these words; for the boy, on being
questioned by Master Myleton, doctor of theology, and others, said that he
neither saw the old man walking on the ground nor heard him speak[451].
The authentic intelligence of plague in England in 1464 is contained in a
letter to the Seignory of Venice from Bruges, dated 5th October, 1464, to
the effect that some Venetian merchants have arrived from London, which
they had quitted on the 26th September. They say the plague is at work
there at the rate of two hundred [deaths] per diem, “and thus writes
[also] Carlo Ziglio.” In April next year, 1465, we hear of it still in
London, through a casual reference in a letter written by one of the
Paston family[452]; and as prevailing all over England, through a formal
entry in the chronicle of Croyland, the last of the monastic records which
continued to be kept. There was an infection of the air, we read, in the
whole of England, so that many thousands of people of every age came to
their death suddenly, like sheep slaughtered[453].
The very next year, 1466, Parliament is adjourned from Westminster on
account of the infection in London, to meet at Reading. Next summer, 1st
July, 1467, there is another adjournment to Reading (6 November), because
of the heat and because the plague was beginning to reign, by which
certain members of the House of Commons had been cut off. After an
interval of four years we hear of plague, in a Paston letter, and by a
Southwell record. On 2 August, 1471, the residentiary canons of Southwell
Minster vote themselves leave of absence for a month “quia regnat morbus
pestiferus in villa Southwell, et furit excessivé morbus pestiferus[454].”
On 13 September, 1471, Sir John Paston writes from near Winchester: “I
cannot hear by pilgrims that pass the country, nor none other man that
rideth or goeth any country, that any borough town in England is free from
that sickness. God cease it when it please him!” Apart from London the
English town which has the most disastrous record for this period is
Hull[455]. The plague was so severe there, in three epidemics close
together, as almost to ruin the place. It broke out in 1472, and had swept
off a great number of the inhabitants before the end of the year,
including the mayor. In 1476 it broke out afresh, causing a great
mortality. In 1478 it was more violent than ever, the number of its
victims being given as 1580, including the mayor and all his family; the
people fled the town, the church was shut up, and the streets deserted and
grass-grown. The epidemic appears to have been, as usual, an autumnal one,
ceasing at the approach of winter. Meanwhile, in 1474, there is mention of
a serious prevalence of plague in the Royal household, as well as
elsewhere in London. The weather of the previous autumn, 1473, had been
remarkable. Labourers are said to have died in the harvest-field from the
excessive heat, and “fervues, axes, and the bloody flyx” (fevers, agues,
and dysentery) to have been universal in divers parts of England; but
there was no dearth. The unusual character of that season, or of the
season preceding, was indicated by the bursting forth of underground
reservoirs of water[456].
The great plague of this period in London should most probably be placed
under the years 1478-9. Merely to show the difficulties of the chronology
it may be worth while citing the various accounts. The Greyfriars’
Chronicle says, under the year 17 Edward IV., that the term was “deferred
from Ester to Michaelmas because of the grete pestylens[457].” The 17th of
Edward IV. was 1477. But Fabyan, who was now a citizen of London
(afterwards sheriff and alderman), enters it under the civic year 1478-79,
or the year which begins for him with the new lord mayor taking office on
30 October. His words are: “This year was great mortality and death in
London and many other parts of this realm, the which began in the latter
end of Senii [September] in the preceding year and continued in this year
till the beginning of November, in the which passed time died innumerable
people in the said city and many places elsewhere[458].” Grafton says,
under the year 1478, that the chief mortality fell in four months of great
heat, during which the pestilence was so fierce and quick that fifteen
years’ war had not consumed a third as many people[459]. To reconcile
these dates we should have to take the year of the Greyfriars’ Chronicle
as 1478, so that the adjournment of the term from Easter to Michaelmas,
might suit the four months in Grafton. At the same time, Fabyan’s
statement that the plague “continued in this year till November,” is
correct for 1479. Sir John Paston writes home from London, 29 Oct. 1479,
of his danger from the sickness; he died there on 15th November; and his
brother, who came up from Norfolk to bury him, writes to his mother, who
wished him “to haste out of the air that he was in,” that the sickness is
“well ceased” in December.
The year 1478, the first of two plague-seasons in London, was also a year
of plague at Hull, and at Newcastle and Southwell. The account for
Newcastle, in its annals under 1478, is merely that great numbers died of
the plague[460]. At Southwell, on 5 July, 1478, the canons residentiary
again take leave of absence for the summer, “because it may be probably
estimated that the dire pestilential affliction in the town of Southwell
will continue, and because the venerable men, with their domestics, have a
just fear of incurring the infection of the said pestiferous
affliction[461].” Next year, 1479, an “incredible number” died of plague
at Norwich[462], and at villages like Swainsthorp, where “they have died
and been sick nigh in every house[463].”
Thus in two years, 1478-79, we hear of an epidemic of plague of the first
rank in London, an epidemic most severe for the size of the place, at
Hull, and epidemics at Southwell, Newcastle and Norwich. This is not
unlike the plague-years that we often find in the centuries following.
Whether it be that we are merely coming to a time of better records, or
that the disease itself was getting worse in English towns, these later
years of Edward IV. are comparable to plague-periods under the Tudors and
the Stuarts.
The period from the Black Death of 1349 to the reign of Edward IV.
witnesses a considerable change in the habits, so to speak, of plague in
England. In the earlier part of that period, the epidemics of
“pestilence”--although they were not all of plague or wholly of
plague--are general throughout England, like the great mortality itself
but on a smaller scale. As late as 1407, or perhaps 1439, we still hear of
“the disease called the pestilence” being universal and in the homes of
the peasantry. The extent of the sickness in 1465, or even the type of it,
is not sufficiently known. From that time onwards town and country are
contrasted in the matter of plague; it becomes usual to flee to the
country so as to escape the pestilential air in town in the summer heats,
and the unwholesomeness of the London air becomes on numerous occasions a
real reason, or a pretext, for the adjournment of Parliament. All the
while, the plague was the lineal descendant of the Black Death,--a virus
so potent on its first entry into English soil as to overrun every parish
of the land.
Plague and other pestilences in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475.
The materials for the history of plague in Scotland, including the Black
Death and subsequent outbreaks down to the end of the medieval period, are
much fewer than for England. From the English chroniclers (Knighton and Le
Baker) we learn that the Black Death in the autumn of 1349 extended from
the northern counties to the Scots army in the Forest of Selkirk.
According to Fordoun, plague would have been general in Scotland in 1350;
but as he includes in his reference “several years before and after” and
“divers parts of the world,” his statement that nearly a third part of the
human race paid the debt of nature is perhaps a mere echo of the general
estimate and without reference specially to Scotland[464]. His next
general reference to pestilence is under the year 1362, when the same
kind of disease and the same extent of mortality as in 1350 occurred
throughout all Scotland[465]. But as he says elsewhere that the visit of
David, king of Scots, to Aberdeenshire in 1361, when he took Kildrummy
Castle from the earl of Mar, was determined in the first instance by the
prevalence of plague in the southern part of his kingdom[466], it may be
inferred that the epidemic had begun late in that year in the south,
coincident with the _pestis secunda_ of England, and had been interrupted
by the coming on of winter, as in the first epidemic of 1349 and 1350. The
next mortality recorded by Fordoun he names the fourth (_quarta
mortalitas_) and assigns to 1401[467]. The question arises as to the
third; and it appears that there were indeed two plague-years in Scotland
between 1362 and 1401--namely, 1380 and 1392, both of them corresponding
nearly to great plagues in the north of England. In the former year sir
John Lyon, lord of Glamis, was unable to hold his court as auditor of the
exchequer in certain places owing to the plague[468]. In 1392, also, the
custumars of Haddington, Peebles, and Dumbarton did not attend the
“chamberlain ayres” on account of the pestilence[469]. In 1402 (not in
1401, as Fordoun has it), the custumars of Stirling were absent from the
audit by reason of the plague[470]; and in the same financial year (10
July, 1402, to 18 July, 1403), only one bailie from Dundee attended the
audit at Perth, the others being dead in the pestilence[471].
For a whole generation there is no documentary evidence of plague in
Scotland. But Fordoun has two entries of a disease which he calls
_pestilentia volatilis_--it can hardly have been plague and may have been
influenza--the one in 1430, having begun at Edinburgh in February, and the
other in 1432 at Haddington[472].
Under the year 1439, an old chronicle, _Ane Addicioun of Scottis
Cornicklis and Deidis_ records one of those seasons of famine and
dysentery or lientery, with some more sudden sickness, which have been
described for England in a former chapter. “The samen time there was in
Scotland a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40_s._, and the boll
of ait meal 30_s._; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died a
passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the wame-ill,
was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there died, owther
in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland. And that samen
year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at Dumfries, and it was
callit the _Pestilence but Mercy_, for there took it nane that ever
recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours[473].” Here the
“land-ill” or “wame-ill” (dysentery or lientery) is contrasted within “the
pestilence,” which latter is said to have supervened the same year,
beginning at Dumfries and proving peculiarly deadly. This was a year of
plague, said to be “universal,” in England (where famine also was severe),
and of an enormous mortality in France.
The continuator of Fordoun records under the year 1455 (James II.) a great
pestilential mortality of men through the whole kingdom, an epidemic which
would be again a year behind the corresponding plague in England[474]. We
hear of it next definitely in the year 1475, which falls within the series
of plague-years at Hull, and elsewhere in the southern part of the island.
On account of an outbreak of pestilence the king of Scots adjourned the
meeting of the estates from September 1475 to the Epiphany following[475],
when the Parliament actually met. The same year there was a
plague-hospital on Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, and not for the first
time; ten marts from the Orkneys were landed there for the quarantined
patients[476].
The references to plague in Scotland begin again about the year 1498; but
these, according to the division of our subject, will come into another
chapter.
The references to plagues in Ireland after the invasion of 1349 are
extremely meagre; but they make it probable that outbursts of bubo-plague
recurred at intervals, as well as occasional epidemics of flux and other
diseases brought on by scarcity or bad corn. The continuators of Clyn’s
Kilkenny annals enumerate various _pestes_--_secunda_, _tertia_, _quarta_
and _quinta_--just as the English annalists do. The _secunda_ falls in
1362, its season in Scotland also[477]. The _tertia_ is given under 1373;
but also under 1370[478]. The _quarta_ is in 1382 (or 1385), and the
_quinta_ in 1391. But there is little or no independent evidence that this
chronology, originally made for England, is really good for Ireland also.
The only other entry, until the Tudor period, is “fames magna in Hibernia”
in 1410[479].