The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Until then there was no answer that worked, no solution, so the plague cut much deeper than other pandemics. Like terrorism, like AIDS in our time, it settled in memory and panic and stung a sense of guilt into life.

  Plague had to be given a shape because you can fight something with a shape.

  In plague legends from Sweden, Denmark and Norway plague can be a black mist, a blue vapour or smoke, as clearly ominous as clouds before a storm. It can be two children walking, or an old woman who carries a broom or a rake; she sweeps in front of houses where people will die, and if there are going to be survivors, she counts out the number of the dead by hitting the door with her broom. Young persons dancing in a barn all night meet a three-footed goat called Hel, and the next morning they are sick and plague gallops off across the land, now in the shape of a white horse. Sometimes plague is an animal that nobody has ever seen before. It takes away the young, the old, the sick and the women and it leaves whole districts barren. Since it took a hundred years for the population numbers of Scandinavia to recover, and four hundred in the case of Norway, you can understand why so often the stories try to end with a couple: the only living person on the north side of a fjord is a woman, the only one to the south is a man. ‘They moved in together,’ the story says, ‘and were married.’

  The sickness is sometimes a stranger, a foreigner, almost always a man: a merchant off the ships. There are stories of ships that ran aground with the crew all dead and their bodies blackened, occasionally a survivor, and when the bodies are buried and the cargo stolen, the people on the land start to die. The stories sometimes say ‘the plague crept out of the cargo’, just like rats. The image of the dead ship and black bodies is still with us; it is Dracula coming ashore from a silent ship at Whitby in the Stoker novel or the Murnau film. Sometimes the landing place seems unlikely – a death ship beached on the open Danish shore is very possible but a ship could hardly drift unmanned through the islands and channels that lead to the harbour at Bergen – but the stories agree that plague comes by sea.

  The same images struck the writers of chronicles. Matthias van Neuenburg lived through the plague, and he wrote of ‘pestilence – the greatest death rate, unheard of since the time of the Flood’. He libelled the Jews for poisoning wells. He ignored the sins of people like him, which would usually take the blame, but he mentions the sins of others: wandering holy persons flogging themselves for penitence, as though that were the natural consequence of any epidemic. He was mostly struck by a single image: ‘ships out at sea, loaded with cargo, but with all the crew dead and no master’.5

  Once ashore, plague goes about sometimes in a red shirt and sometimes a blue jacket: a woman carrying a book where she can read who will live and who will die. The written word had terrifying authority in a world where not everyone could both read and write; you could never escape the written record. Plague goes slowly and erratically overland, which makes its progress somehow more uncanny: it comes suddenly, kills suddenly, village by village. Children are left yelling alone in empty valleys. The bells ring out, fires are lit if there is anyone left to signal. Survivors go wandering, carrying with them the spirit of the plague; so they have to be burned alive, or else buried alive so the plague will stay with them and stop travelling. Children without parents, not known in the valley, begging for food: they were buried. So was a girl who watched a grave being dug, obediently got into the grave when the gravediggers asked her to see if it was deep enough yet; then ‘they reached for the spade and buried the girl alive in the grave with the heaped up dirt’. A village is saved by killing an innocent young man who is then left in the road because everyone knows that plague cannot cross his body. Sometimes the solution is rather more rustic: in one story the woman who drives the dead to the cemetery does not get sick ‘because she smoked a chalk pipe’.6

  Nobody knew quite what plague was. We don’t, either; there is room for debate about exactly what organisms, or what deadly marriage of organisms, caused the Black Death. We can agree, though, that rats matter, because they carry infected fleas and they move: slow, but persistent, always onwards.

  Rats are missing from the archaeological record around the North Sea right into the early Middle Ages. To thrive in large numbers, rats need store cupboard places, tightly packed with people and food, and those were scarce. It is possible they came into Northern Europe on the Viking ships plying down the great Russian rivers from Byzantium; the first rat bones in York are from the time of Viking settlement, and there are no bones at the great trading centre of Birka in Sweden until around 810 CE, when the Viking routes were opened wide. Their timing was excellent. The growing cities and towns were full of opportunity. Rats do not like crossing wide streets, and the new towns were busy and cramped. Houses with several floors and wooden frames were just going up along London streets in the fourteenth century: boxes of people, and sewage and garbage,7 ‘heaped up together, and in a sort smothered with many families of children and servants in one house’, as a royal proclamation in 1580 noticed, trying yet again to stop new building and families sharing, and failing yet again.8

  The almost universal curfew at night suited rats because they have sensitive ears and like quiet; they stay away from any workshop where there is hammering. They have a human taste for warmth, and in the North, unlike the Mediterranean, they need houses and food stores, warm and solid structures, perhaps even the bathhouses; and in the busy North, shipping grain and wool and cloth about, there was constant transport for them, in and out of towns, between towns, out across the sea. Better still, their enemies were ruined by the same steady growth of towns. As human beings took the land that once had been forest for building streets or growing food, so there were fewer and fewer weasels and foxes, fewer owls out hunting silently in the night. Rats were warm, fed and safe from almost anything but the plague they carried.9

  The plague was democratic: it killed anyone. Preachers blamed the sheer weight of human sin. Doctors blamed the pestilential air and suggested burning incense; they warned that bathing too much would open the pores to sickness; they tried to find some event in the skies and stars to explain everything. The astrologer Geoffrey de Meaux was in England when the plague came, and he was struck by the way sickness seemed to skip streets or even neighbouring houses, but he was sure he knew why: each house, street or side of a street had different stellar influences or rulers ‘and therefore the impact of the heavens cannot affect them all equally’.10 His confidence in the stars was not always shared. The Paris medical faculty was forced to concede that the conjunction of Saturn, Mars and Jupiter in 1345 ‘cannot explain everything we would wish’. Conrad of Megenberg decided that the conjunction had somehow made the earth tremble, putting out pestilential vapours, and the Flemish musician Louis Sanctus blamed ‘the stinking breath of the wind’ for sending the plague travelling. The fabric of prediction and analysis was beginning to look rather unsure.11

  The plague did not undo all experts. The sovereign remedy for plague and its symptoms was a compound called theriac, a mix which in the beginning contained the flesh of vipers to build up immunity against snakebite.12 The thirteenth-century version was thick and syrupy, made of wine and honey and sometimes containing eighty ingredients like saffron and rhubarb, cinnamon and ginger, ground coral, rose water and myrrh; theriac gives us the word ‘treacle’. The standard text on cures, the Antidotarium Nicolai, used in Paris from around 1270, calls it ‘the mistress of medicines’, effective against asthma, epilepsy or dropsy, ‘the most serious infirmities of the human body’. It could be sniffed, swallowed, sucked, spread as an ointment or used as a suppository. Naturally it was prescribed against plague, the older the better; evidently you laid down theriac like you lay down wine or whisky. Nobody knew quite how it worked, but that was true of many compound medicines, which were more effective than their ingredients taken one by one. Theriac was supposed both to strengthen the healthy body and save the sick from the worst of their suffering.

  Theriac soun
ds as doubtful as the remedies that alchemists were pursuing, the fantastical dream of finding an ‘elixir’ that would heal just as well as miracles: the quintessence of wine or of gold. Theriac mixture can vary so much in its ingredients and its ageing that this one supreme cure only adds to the confusion about remedies that were handed out during plagues. The odd thing is this: theriac worked, and people knew it. What’s more, it worked for a reason that modern pharmacists would recognize: it delivered a high dose of opium, which was basic to the recipe. It was probably given in its fastest acting form, which is laudanum. Opium blocked diarrhoea, calmed down coughing, relieved pain in the joints and pain from boils and ulcers, and most of all it settled anxiety for a while; it was a wonderful holiday from dying.

  That was a huge relief for people who lived at close quarters with mortality, and did not expect to win. The Black Death of 1348–9 followed the failed harvest of 1346–7 and the prospect of famine. Hunger was familiar. In 1315 rain ruined the harvest and grain prices were six times normal; and the next two summers, in a Europe slowly getting colder, were just as bad. Twenty-three prisoners in Northampton jail died from lack of food. They were lucky in a way: there were rumours of cannibalism, prisoners eating prisoners, parents eating children.13 Lice and the fleas on rats spread typhus among humans, and various murrains took the cows and the oxen. Rural life was disrupted because the workforce was weak and scarce and there were too few animals to dung the fields and keep them productive. The greatest burden lay on the poor.14 They had no work to make money and not enough money to buy food if they could find any. Anyone with money could find supplies, of course; famine is not at all democratic since you can buy your way out.

  Plague, on the other hand, takes anyone and everyone, a true shock to elites who fancied themselves protected by law, by strong walls, by money and other people’s obligations.

  The death toll made labour scarce, which should have pushed up its value or at least its cost; great persons who had been used to the constant labour of women and men who were glad to earn, or else the service of serfs, now had to contend with a whole new class of persons who thought they had choices. Labourers once ate bread made of beans, drank water, wore grey; ‘then was the world of such folk well-ordered in its estate’, as the poet John Gower wrote. Now there were fewer of them, they had drinks besides water, they wanted decent food and a good wage, they dressed well, they had money for beds and pillows; they went poaching and even hunting. Gower worried about who would grow the food on which city people depended since ‘scarcely a rustic wishes to do such work; instead he wickedly loafs everywhere’. The thirteenth-century Bartholomaeus Anglicus, from the universities of Paris and Oxford, had warned about this. The peasantry, he said, usually kept down by various and clashing duties and charges, living with wretchedness and woe, would change if ever their circumstances changed: they would ‘wax stout and proud’.

  Workers now thought they could choose where to be, which master to serve, how much would be a fair wage. In his chronicle, Henry Knighton complained that workers were ‘arrogant and obstinate’ for wanting higher wages when the cost of food was soaring. A French labour law of 1354 expresses great crossness at those who worked ‘whenever it pleased them, and spending the rest of their time in taverns playing games and enjoying themselves’. This was not just an irritant; it was a threat. A petition to the English Parliament in 1377 warned of peasants making ‘confederation and alliance together to resist the lords and their officials by force’. When the peasants did march on Mile End in 1381 to present their own petition to the king, they demanded that ‘no man should serve any man except at his own will’.

  Everyone had to be fixed in place because the poor would never have chosen theirs. It was generally agreed that work was a punishment for Adam’s fall from grace, and if nature refused to co-operate with man it was because sin had corrupted the weather, the soil and the natural world. Being poor brought no spiritual rewards unless you chose to be poor, and no great improvement, either; peasants seemed to have much the same anger, pride and greed as barons. Being poor was just wretched; an early-fourteenth-century poem, the Song of the Husbandman, suggests ‘we might as well die now as struggle on like this’. The poor were not even attractive; Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, had to confess he did not like the way they smelled. He prayed for forgiveness for his reaction, but still he found them distasteful.

  When in the thirteenth century peasants made a brief appearance in the new stained glass of cathedrals like Chartres and Le Mans, they were shown being busy where the donor of the glass would usually be, but only because they were shorthand for the gift of a vineyard or some land that had paid for the window, so their labour was support for the church. By the fourteenth century, even this sort of dependency was too much to acknowledge; peasants went back to the margins of lovely manuscripts for the delight of rich individuals. They were shown doing easy, orderly chores in perfect weather, rarely in groups of more than two and dedicated to the job.15 The English market, having had quite enough of rebellious peasants, was particularly keen on this vision of order.

  The language about workers began to sound curiously modern. In William Langland’s great poem about Piers Plowman and his allegorical quest to save the world, there are ‘shirkers’ that Piers threatens with starvation, but their only response is to fake failing eyesight and twisted limbs, all the tricks that, he says, ‘layabouts’ know. The character Waster, the worst of the lot, is deeply unimpressed by anything that Piers can threaten to get the people to bring in his harvest; he says he doesn’t give a damn for the law or any knight’s authority, or Piers and his plough, and what’s more he will beat up the lot if he ever sees them again. Workless is lawless; some of the poor are undeserving. You can’t believe a cripple when he says he finds walking difficult. The world is full of idle people who must be goaded into action. Nobody respects old Romans like Cato any more, or his instructions to those born poor: ‘Bear your poverty with patience.’ This new kind of labourer wants hot food at mid-day and a ‘lordly’ wage, or else he feels exploited. In the end it is only the presence of Hunger, the memory of the terrible famines and the fact that food was always scarce at the end of summer when last year’s grain was finished and this year’s crop was not yet reaped which drives the men to the threshing floor.16

  In the summer of 1349, the harvest was rotting in the English fields because of ‘the many people, and especially workers and servants, now dead in this pestilence’. The answer was law: the Ordinance of Labourers and then the Statute of Labourers. Wages and prices were to be controlled and labour contracts were to be long, public and unbreakable; those were not new rules, and they were mostly directed at ploughmen and country workers and those who paid them. The law mentioned tailors, saddlers, goldsmiths, blacksmiths and shoemakers but they were not the ones who were prosecuted; it left out the professionals like notaries whose fees were controlled by law elsewhere, in particular by the laws that King John II proposed for the Île de France around the same time. But the next provision was quite extraordinary: anyone with nothing else to do could be ‘bound to serve anyone who requires his or her services, as long as the service is appropriate to his or her estate’. Anyone under sixty, woman or man, bonded or free, had to obey, and to accept the wages being paid before the plague arrived when there was no shortage of labour. Anyone who failed to accept the work went to jail until they had a change of mind.17

  This was something entirely new. There were still some slaves, mostly working for foreigners, but this is not slavery; nobody owns anybody else, but nobody controls his own labour any more, either. Peasants might hold land in return for doing work, which was not exactly an arrangement freely negotiated, but it was at least akin to some kind of payment on a lease. There were serfs, of course, who kept the great estates going with their unpaid labour and only sometimes held land in return; but this new law was not directed at serfs. Indeed, serfs had one of the few defences against compulsion; William Meere in 1352 t
old a court that he was already the serf of the prior of Boxgrove and so he could not possibly be required to work for anyone else.

  There was a means test: anyone who did not have enough land or money or goods could be pushed into service. That does not mean paid work; in service, you got shelter and food and if you were lucky a bit of cash when the contract was finished. Otherwise, you were tied. People who themselves had servants could be caught by the rules, like Agnes, wife of a shepherd who had already been in court because he had the nerve to demand ‘excessive’ wages; she was ordered to come and hoe the corn of John Maltby, refused, and ‘she also did not permit her two maidservants to do this work’. Neighbours in nearby houses could suddenly be labelled vagrants, and a person could be judged idle if she or he was happy to work for daily wages but did not want a long-term contract. The law was determined to settle a whole society down: no kindness to ‘unworthy beggars’, no travel for beggars or workers without letters of authorization.

  All this was managed with one more new idea: summary punishment, no need to prove a case in court or even hold a trial. There had to be two witnesses to a refusal to serve, but once they had told their story anyone refusing work could be put in the stocks or taken off to jail, where they stayed until they agreed to labour. The new justices of labourers who made these laws work were kept quite furiously busy; those in Essex in 1352 handled thousands of cases, involving perhaps one in seven of the adults in the county. When the justices were eliminated in the 1360s, and cases came first to justices of the peace and then to the King’s Bench, the records are sparse and sometimes missing altogether; but we know enough from the early years to see that the machinery of the law was mostly used against workers who wanted more money than employers wanted to pay. This is not surprising; if someone’s offence was refusing work there was nothing to discuss. They were judged on the spot and punished until they agreed to do what was wanted. There was no need to go to the kind of court that keeps records.