A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  If all else failed, of course, there was begging or crime. It was in Edward Ill’s reign above all that the reality, as well as the legend, of the forest outlaw entered the national culture. Then, for the desperate or the adventurous, there was the lure of the towns, especially the great ant heap of London, its population perhaps numbering as many as 100,000 on the eve of the Black Death. If the migrant was not quite so bold, there were less remote centres like Norwich, York or Bristol, none of them with populations greater than 10,000 but, compared to a village of fifty or a hundred souls, a metropolis of unimaginable numbers. Bristol was the first major town in England to fall to the plague, and it was the kind of place that was a perfect factory for the reproduction of the bacillus, a hospitable port of entry to cargoes, crews and rats coming from already infected regions of Europe. Its narrow, tightly packed streets were home to much the same animal population as in the villages – backyards full of pigs, chickens and swill – while the alley ways (despite the king’s campaign to have them cleaned up) were running with open sewers and refuse from noxious trades like tanning and dyeing.

  Stuck inside these lousy, busy commonwealths in the summer of 1348, few would have noticed the nibble of the flea until it was too late and the dread buboes appeared. The bodies began to mount up as hundreds died every day; those with least resistance – the youngest and the oldest and the poorest – were the earliest victims. In a town ripe for infection, almost one in two people – about 45 per cent of the population – perished within the year. Fifteen of Bristol’s fifty-two councillors died within six months, their names struck through with a cross as they passed away. Henry Knighton, the chronicler, wrote that in Bristol: ‘virtually the whole town was annihilated. It was as if sudden death had marked them down beforehand for few lay sick for more than two or three days.’ In Knighton’s own town of Leicester 700 died in a single parish in a matter of days. ‘The pestilence grew so strong,’ wrote Thomas Burton, a monk in Yorkshire, ‘that men and women dropped dead in the streets.’ These provincial towns were abruptly cut in two, between a city of the living and a city of the dead and dying. Families – and contrary to many myths about medieval England, these were all basic nuclear families of two parents and their children – would have been poignantly split, the healthy moving away from the sick. Whatever their remorse, parents might be forced to abandon some children for whom they could do nothing to save others still clean of the disease. ‘There was in those days,’ wrote a monk of Westminster, ‘death without sorrow, marriage without affection, want without poverty, flight without escape.’

  Everything that had been taken for granted became suddenly questionable. Where could one find bread now that there were no bakers, for the open hearths in most houses would not make it? Where might one find physic now that none seemed to work? And who would take away the bodies before their putrefaction caused yet more contagion? In Rochester, Kent, William Dene wrote:

  Alas this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves from which arose such a stench that it was barely possible for anyone to go past the churchyard.

  The bigger the town, the greater the trauma. When the first wave of the plague hit London 300 people died every day within the square mile of the city itself. As fast as people died, new cemeteries were dug with mass pits. At East Smithfield they were stacked in haste, five rows deep. While the ancient hospital cemetery at Spitalfields was being excavated in 1999 the archaeologists discovered close by something quite different: a mass burial pit, strongly suggesting the panic of a sudden epidemic, with thousands of bodies, many of them very young. Instead of being carefully interred with their feet facing east, so that the dead might stand upright facing Jerusalem on the Day of Judgement as in a regular graveyard, the bodies had been flung in the pit pell-mell, like so much human junk. One of these impromptu burial grounds was sited on land given by the Bishop of London. Enclosed by walls, it rapidly acquired the nickname ‘No Man’s Land’. When he wrote his survey of London in 1598, John Stow claimed to have read a document from the reign of Edward III listing 50,000 bodies that had been dumped in these pits; the figure was almost certainly an exaggeration but nevertheless a shocking reminder of the enormity of the disaster.

  Inevitably, some of those bodies went to their maker without benefit of clergy, as the supply of parish priests was itself dwindling. In January 1349 the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote to his clergy: ‘Priests cannot be found for love or money . . . to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments of the Church – perhaps because the fear they will catch the disease.’ If none can be found, the bishop went on, the laity need to be told that it was proper to confess their sins to a lay person or even (a really radical step) ‘to a woman if no man is available’. But bishops were often also aristocrats and like the rest of the rich they could choose the luxury of flight, doubtless justifying their behaviour in terms of the necessity of saving the princes of the Church. Bishop Bateman of Norwich, in one of the worst-hit areas, damp and boggy East Anglia, spent most of the summer of 1349 in the saddle, trying to outrun the plague, ending up on his own estates at Hoxne, where he hunkered down, fearing the worst. By this time, the pestilence had penetrated the length and breadth of the British isles. Courting hubris, the Scots had decided that the prostration of England was a perfect time to mount an invasion and recoup their losses against Edward. An army of many thousands duly gathered at the traditional mustering place of Selkirk forest. But before it could march, the plague struck the camp. The army disintegrated, 5000 died, the remainder fleeing home, taking the Black Death with them.

  Those who had nowhere left to run became resigned to their fate. As enclosed communities, monasteries were especially hard hit. Of the forty-two monks in the Cistercian abbey of Meaux, Yorkshire, just ten survived the first wave of the plague. In August alone Thomas Burton, later abbot and one of the few survivors, recorded twenty-two deaths among the monks and six lay brothers. Six were buried on a single day. In Kilkenny in Ireland the Franciscan monk John Clynn set down the horrors he had seen and then, as if measuring his shroud at the end of the world, wrote: ‘Seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, I have committed to writing what I have truly heard . . . and so that the writing does not perish with the writer or the work fail with the workman I leave parchment for continuing it in case anyone should be alive in the future.’ At which point, a second hand writes: ‘Here, it seems, the author died.’

  When the survivors recovered from the shock of the first brutal wave of the Black Death, they asked, inevitably, why us, why now? For many in Europe the answer was obvious: the Jews had poisoned the wells and rivers. So there were the usual slaughters that made the Gentiles feel better but did nothing to halt the buboes. In England, where there were no Jews, men of learning and men of faith had different answers to give, although both communities believed the answers lay in the heavens. Many of the learned believed that there had been a fatal three-way conjunction of the planets. Benevolent, moist Jupiter had come into conjunction with hot, dry Mars and the mysterious, malevolent force of Saturn. Others thought that filth had been responsible. The muck of men and beasts, offal and sewage, rising from lakes, swamps and ditches, had vaporized into a dank, smoggy curtain – the fatal miasma – which hung over the earth, bred contagion and then dropped its poisoned seeds back on to the ground. Those who wanted to improve their chances of survival were well advised to steer clear of noxious resorts where the polluted air might form a mass – tanneries and butchers’ shops and even brothels (for the pungent fumes of lust were said to be a major source of the miasma) – and if dangerous odours were unavoidable (as they were for most people in the fourteenth century), their effects might be prophylactically resisted by wearing little packets of sweet-smelling herbs about the
neck or body: dittany, lavender or thyme. Herbalists even offered antidotes to those already stricken. One herbal advised:

  If it be a man take five cups of rue, and if it be a woman leave out the rue, five little blades of columbine, a great quantity of marigold flowers, an egg, fresh laid, and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within, and lay it to the fire and roast it till ground to powder but do not burn it, and take a good quantity of treacle and brew all these herbs with good ale but do not strain them – and make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings. If they hold it in their stomach [a tall order in the best of circumstances], they shall have life.

  If God decided otherwise, though, there was no potion in the world that could stay his judgement. Many had already come to the conclusion that it was human behaviour, rather than a disorder in the air, that had called down divine wrath. In 1344 John of Reading had warned that shameless dress, a symptom of vanity and debauchery, would certainly invite punishment: ‘Women wearing clothes so tight that they wore a fox tail hanging down inside their skirts at the back to hide their arses.’ Monks like Henry Knighton and Thomas Burton of Meaux believed that the shameless tournaments of the 1340s had provoked retribution. Burton remembered women coming in droves to the spectacle, not with their husbands but with paramours, who ‘used them to satisfy their sexual urges’. Even worse, Knighton thought, was the habit of women dressing as men at these gaudy shows, ‘in parti-coloured tunics with short hoods and liripipes like strings wound across the head, and belts thickly studded with gold and silver slung across their heads, below the navel with knives called daggers suspended from pouches beneath them’. The great Benedictine preacher Thomas Brinton took a good look at the face of concupiscent, complacent, Edwardian England and found it utterly abhorrent:

  We are not constant in faith; we are not honourable in the eyes of the world, on the contrary of all men we are the falsest and in consequence unloved by God. It is undoubtedly for that reason that there exists in the kingdom of England so marked a diminution of fruitfulness; so cruel a pestilence, so much injustice, so many illegitimate children – for on every side there is so much lechery and adultery that few men are contented with their wives but each man lusts after the wife of his neighbour or keeps a stinking concubine.

  The long-term remedy, then, would not lie in potions or the kind of street-cleaning measures that Edward III ordered to be undertaken in London. Rather, what was needed was a moral sanitation campaign, beginning with the processions, fasts, penances and prayers for the intercession of the Virgin that erupted all over the country along with the plague. Those who had the means attempted to escape from the places where moral as well as physical pollution was most concentrated – the cities and towns – and followed the advice of the poet John Lydgate, whose Dietary and Doctrine for the Pestilence recommended that the prudent take themselves off to the countryside where they might have supposed both the air and the manners were sweeter and the contagion less virulent.

  If that was their expectation, they were in for a shock. Scenes of ruin and neglect would have greeted them. A third of the houses would have been empty, scythes and sickles were going to rust, and anvils and looms were gathering dust. Sheep and cattle wandered about amid the unharvested fields. ‘For want of watching,’ Henry Knighton wrote, ‘animals died in uncountable numbers in the fields and byways and hedges.’

  Historians are supposed to take the long view and detach themselves from the emotions of the moment. Looking beyond the immediate trauma, many have concluded that in the villages the plague was not so much the great reaper, obliterating rural life from top to bottom, as a winnower, sorting viable from unviable communities, killing off hamlets that had already been weakened and thinned out by the hard times of the early fourteenth century. But to those hit brutally hard – in the villages around Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, for example, where 60 per cent of the population perished in a year – the information that this was all part of a structural change from a manorial to a cash economy would have been little comfort. All the villagers could see were the bodies of infants; orphaned children, dirty and wandering; crops bolting into weeds; missing parish priests; and cows, swollen and lowing for want of being milked.

  The manorial rolls vividly document precisely what happened in the first year or two after the plague struck. On the Bishop of Winchester’s manor in Farnham, fifty-two households – a good third of his villagers – died in the first year of the plague. Initially, the bishop’s reeve had no difficulty finding takers to move into the empty lots and was pleased to take their entry fee. But by 1350, when the plague struck again, the situation became much more serious. By the time that the Black Death in Farnham finally receded, fully 1300 had died, and the rolls humanize that calamity by putting names to numbers: Matilda Stikker, who perished along with her family, and the serving girl, Matilda Talvin, who was put out of work when her master died along with his entire household. But while the plague at Farnham took, it also gave. John Crudchate, then a minor, was left an orphan, but an orphan with assets since he inherited the lots of both his father and another relative, perhaps an uncle. The consolidation of all those strips would have been the making of a small but serious village fortune, and it pulled young Crudchate up from the poorest to among the best endowed of the village. He could now afford geese.

  A momentous change was under way in the villages of England, Wales and Scotland. The balance of economic power was shifting dramatically and, for once, it favoured the people not the lords. Before he, too, died from the plague, the reeve of Farnham complained that the harvest was costing twelve pence an acre to bring in – double the pre-plague rates. Labour was thin on the ground now, and it was beginning to charge accordingly. Farnham’s story could be repeated all over the country. Whether the Black Death was the prime cause of a great rural transformation or whether it merely completed a process that had been under way for generations, the countryside of late medieval Britain was unquestionably an irreversibly altered world. For one thing, it had no more serfs. For some time it had been getting harder to force unfree peasants to do unpaid work for their lord – to cart hay or plough fields, for example, merely in recognition of a legal right to occupy their house and yard – but now, when the laws of supply and demand so obviously favoured the survivors, it was virtually impossible. To a lord’s or a reeve’s demand that certain tasks be done, the peasant could respond by demanding to be paid, or paid at a higher rate than before. If a deserted holding was on offer, it would now be the tenant not the lord who could set the terms of occupancy. And if the lord found this new economic assertiveness insolent, the peasant could simply up sticks and find a manor where the owner had a more secure grip on the new economic reality. It had long been a legal axiom that ‘town air makes free’ – a year of residence in a city could change legal status – but in the new world of the plague, where disappearances of all kinds were commonplace, there were precious few ways to discover where exactly an errant peasant had gone and what he was doing. Following the labour market hundreds of thousands migrated to wherever their economic and social prospects were best served. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Matthew Oxe was one such fellow who said goodbye to serfdom and to the village of Staverton, Suffolk, where his family had been unfree peasants. Around 1430 Matthew disappeared for parts unknown, possibly entering the service of the Duke of Norfolk at Framlingham Castle. Twenty-five years later he returned in triumph to Staverton, showing off to the manorial court the document that certified his freedom. Matthew paid six pence to have a copy of this ‘charter of manumission’ put into the court roll, declaring that henceforth he and his heirs were freemen. He added that henceforth he and his heirs were no longer to be called Oxe, like some beast of burden, but Groom, a more fitting name for someone who obviously had aspirations to join the riding classes.

  King Death was, then, an unlikely liberator, shaking up the old social hierarchy in the countryside and rearranging the rela
tionship between the powerful and the powerless. The onslaught of his scythe cut straight to what, for centuries, had been the heart of feudalism: the contract between submission and protection that had said ‘do what you’re told, stay where you are, and you will be protected from those who may wish you harm’. But in the middle of the fourteenth century, with those who were supposed to make good the promise – the lord’s reeve and his bench on the manorial court, the county knights and their fellow jurors, and even the lord himself, his family and esquires and servants – following each other to the boneyards, this promise must have rung hollow.