by John Kelly
In May 1348, as the plague slithered north through a misty French countryside, Paris was enveloped in a sense of déjà vu. Scarcely two years earlier the English king, Edward III, desiring “nothing so much as a deed of arms,” had landed a force of ten thousand archers and four thousand foot solders on the windswept Cotentin Peninsula, next door to the D-day beaches of 1944; within a month, the English were standing astride the approaches to Paris. The enemy “could be seen by anyone . . . who could mount a turret,” wrote the chronicler Jean de Venette, who described Parisians as “stupefied [with] amazement” by the proximity of the danger.
But the English threat at least had been comprehensible, and the spectacle and glamour of war had provided a tonic for turbulent souls and unquiet minds. Paris in the summer of 1346, like Paris in the summer of 1914, crackled with electricity: shouts and cheers echoed through streets and squares and marketplaces as the
arrière-ban—the general summons to arms—was read. On August 15, there had been the thrilling spectacle of the greatest knights in the realm, led by the dashing Count of Alençon, the king’s brother, rushing out to meet the enemy, accompanied by a brigade of Genoese bowmen and by blind King John of Bohemia. All day long, the thunderous sound of horse hooves had echoed across the cobblestoned Grand Rue. There was also the thrilling news that the king, Philip VI, had challenged Edward to personal combat (Edward refused), and the heartening sight of Philip, sitting on his horse like a simple knight, addressing the humble folk of Paris before marching out to battle. “My good people,” the portly Philip declared, “doubt ye not, the Englishmen will approach you no nearer than they be.”*
Paris in the summer of 1346 had flags to put out, trumpets to blare, war drums to beat. Paris in the summer of 1348 had nothing to do but visit churches, light candles, listen to rumors, think, and wait. “Everyone in our neighborhood, all of us, everyone in Paris is frightened,” wrote the physician Peter Damouzy, who lived to the north of the city. Damouzy, a former member of the Paris medical faculty, tried to occupy his mind by writing a treatise on the pestilence, but the approach of the plague kept breaking into his thoughts. “I write without benefit of time,” he scribbled at one point, and, later, with even more urgency, “I have no time beyond the present to say or write more.”
Physician Damouzy’s account is one of the few reports we have of what, by the summer of 1348, was becoming a common experience—waiting. Though the plague was moving with great swiftness, often advancing several miles in a single day, the sense of shock had evaporated. Most localities had several days’ to several weeks’ advance notice of its arrival. Enough time to think and wonder and worry.
Eight months later, a waiting Strasbourg would vent its anxiety by killing Jews, nine hundred of them. “They were led to their own cemetery into a house prepared for their burning and on their way were stripped naked by the crowd which ripped off their clothes and found much money that had been concealed,” wrote a local chronicler. Paris had no Jews to burn, having banished them all; but in the long rainy weeks of May, June, and July 1348, there were prayers to be said and rumors to listen to, many of them filled with “stupefied amazements.” From Normandy in the west, from Avignon in the south, and from points between came stories of church bells echoing through deserted streets, of black plague flags flying above villages, of abandoned countryside, where the only sound to be heard was the banging of a farmhouse door in the wind. The pestilence’s magisterial pace also gave Parisians ample time to contemplate the meaning of love and duty and honor in a time of plague. What would they do if a loved one was afflicted? What would the loved one do if
they were afflicted? The fear of contagion makes the psychology of plague different from the psychology of war. In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear, and despair.
“In August, a very large and bright star was seen in the west over Paris,” wrote chronicler de Venette, who believed the brilliance of the star “presaged the incredible pestilence which soon followed . . .” However, since no one is sure when the plague arrived in Paris—estimates range from May to August, with June being the most probable date—its start must have been less spectacular than the chronicler’s brilliant star.
On a summer morning when the sky was again heavy with black-bottomed rain clouds and the streets were full of watery light, perhaps a young housewife awoke with a terrible pain in her abdomen. Pulling up her nightshirt, she saw a tumor the size of an almond a few inches above her pubic hair. A few days later, when the almond had become the size of an egg, one of her children developed a mass behind the ear; then the old woman who lived above the afflicted family fell ill with a terrible fever, and the young father who lived below them began to vomit violently; and then a prostitute the father had slept with awoke with pain in her abdomen and then . . .
Moving through the gray, rainy city like a fever, the plague slithered from house to house, street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood. It visited the crowded mercantile quarter on the Right Bank, where the Sienese and Florentine bankers lived; the Grand Rue, where the French cavalry had dashed out to meet the English two years earlier; Les Halles, where local farmers brought their produce on Fridays; St. Jacques-la Boucherie, the butchers’ quarter, where the fierce Paris wind made little ripples in the pools of animal blood; and the Right Bank, where crowds assembled each morning to buy goods from the arriving barges.
Crossing the Grand Pont to the Ile de la Cité, the pestilence visited the Hôtel-Dieu, where patients slept three and four to a bed and the clothes of the dead were sold at monthly auctions; the Cathedral of Notre Dame, built on the site of a Roman temple of Jupiter; the rue Nouvelle Notre Dame, begun the same year as the cathedral, 1163, and built wide and straight to accommodate the heavy wagons that carried construction materials to the cathedral; and the exquisite Sainte Chapelle, where Louis IX—saint, anti-Semite, and patron of William of Rubruck—kept his relics, among them the Crown of Thorns and fragments of the True Cross.
On the Left Bank, already a student quarter, the plague found lodgments in the Sorbonne, established a hundred years earlier by the theologian Robert de Sorbon, and destined, a hundred years hence, to become a fierce enemy of Joan of Arc; the College de Navarre, site of the first public theater in Paris; and, of course, the University of Paris, which vied with Bologna for the title of Europe’s oldest university (Paris dated its origins to the twelfth-century schools of disputation attached to Notre Dame). Contemporary records indicate that the pestilence took a terrible toll on the university faculty; in 1351 and 1352, some disciplines were so short of teachers, the administration had to relax academic qualifications. Remarkably, however, all the authors of the
Compendium seem to have survived the pestilence in good health. A 1349 university roll shows that, as in 1347, there were still forty-six masters on the medical faculty. Another notable survivor of the pestilence was the man who commissioned the faculty to write the
Compendium, King Philip VI.
Corpulent and insecure, Philip was a man of profound contradictions. Though he fought like a lion at Crécy and planned a Viking funeral for himself—the royal heart was to be sent to a church in Bourgfontaine; the royal entrails to a monastic house in Paris so as to double the number of prayers offered up in repose of the royal soul—Philip fled Paris almost as soon as the pestilence arrived. Over the next year, one catches glimpses of him at Fontainebleau, at Melun, and at the casket of his plague-dead queen, the ill-tempered Jeanne of Burgundy, but Philip does not emerge into full public view again until the early 1350s, when he shocked Paris with a heinous betrayal. The high-minded moralist who hated to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain—in Philip’s France blasphemers had their upper lip cut off—stole his eldest son’s bride-to-be, the beautiful Blanche of Navarre, a few months before the couple were to be married.
Jean Morellet, unlike
his king, chose to remain in Paris, and because he did, we have something more fine-grained than the usual chroniclers’ estimates with which to measure the city’s mortality. Morellet was attached to the parish of St. Germain l’Auxerrois as canon or priest—contemporary records are unclear. Today the parish sits in one of the most congested areas of Paris, surrounded by scores of famous neighbors including the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, but in 1340, when Morellet became director of St. Germain’s building fund, the only landmark of any import nearby was the cobblestoned Grand Rue. From his office at the church, the director would have had an unobstructed view of the windmills, boatmen, and rickety piers along the still unembanked Seine.
Morellet’s duties as director of the building fund were not very taxing. When a deceased parishioner left a bequest, he would make a record of it. In the first eight years of his tenure, roughly mid-1340 to mid-1348—the fund received a total of seventy-eight bequests—not enough to keep the director busy. Indeed, the pace of death was so slow in the parish, most of the time Morellet seems to have kept track of the donations in his head. Fund records indicate that he would update the donor list only once or twice a year. However, in the summer of 1348, this pattern changed.
The plague’s arrival in St. Germain is announced with a donation of twenty-four sous. At a time when six sous could buy a man a good horse, twenty-four sous was a significant sum. Even more unusual was the purpose of the bequest. Heretofore, all bequests had gone toward maintenance of the parish church and for future building projects. The twenty-four sous were used to purchase burial shrouds for parishioners. Around the same time, the number of bequests suddenly explodes. For most of the 1340s, annual donations to the fund remained in the single digits. In the nine months between June 1348 and April 25, 1349, a total of 445 were received, roughly a forty-five-fold increase.
During the second half of l349, donations to the fund remained at record levels. In September, fifteen months after the plague’s arrival in Paris and seven months after the municipal cemetery, Holy Innocents, had to be closed for lack of burial space, bequests to the building fund reached an all-time high. Morellet, who was now forced to update the fund records monthly because of the volume of donations, notes that the parish received forty-two bequests; in October, the number dipped, but only slightly, to thirty-six bequests.
Director Morellet’s figures, which represent a single stream of deaths in a single Paris parish, can’t be extrapolated to the entire city. Nonetheless, they show that something unparalleled was happening in Paris, an impression substantiated by chronicler de Venette’s account of events at the Hôtel-Dieu. Like most medieval hospitals, including La Pigonette in Avignon, the hôtel was a retirement home for the elderly, and a shelter for the homeless and indigent as well as medical facility. All three roles put it on the front line during the pestilence.
“For a considerable period,” says the chronicler, “more than 500 bodies a day were being taken in carts from the Hôtel-Dieu [on the Ile de la Cité] . . . for burial at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents [on the Grand Rue].” Many of the caravans carried the bodies of the
filles blanches, the young novitiates who nursed the ill. “The saintly sisters of Hôtel-Dieu,” wrote de Venette, “. . . worked sweetly and with great humility, setting aside consideration of earthly dignity. A great number of [them] were called to a new life and now rest, it is piously believed, with Christ.”
Several historians have called de Venette’s mortality figures into question, but they do not seem out of line with the estimates of other contemporaries. The
Grandes Chroniques de France, kept by the monks of nearby St. Denis, speaks of eight hundred people dying “from one day to the next” in the city. An Italian merchant reports that “on March 13th, [1349] 1573 noblemen were buried not counting petty officials.” Another resident claims that “1328 [people] were buried in a single day.” During the eighteen months between June 1348 and December 1349, Paris seems to have lost the equivalent of a good-sized village almost every day, and on bad days, a good-sized town. According to Richard the Scot, 50,000 residents died during the plague. “Nothing like it has been heard or seen or read about,” wrote a contemporary.
The constancy of the death seems to have dispirited director Morellet. As the year 1349 drew to a close, a certain listlessness becomes apparent in his manner. The director’s record keeping becomes intermittent again, and his work shows an uncharacteristic sloppiness; he no longer bothers to write down the names of new donors, just the sums contributed to the fund; it is as if the dead have lost all meaning for him, as if he can no longer envision them as anything but a pile of corpses in one of the little death carts shuttling back and forth in the rain to the cemetery of Holy Innocents. Historian George Deaux believes that this kind of indifference became common later in the mortality as the monotony of death replaced the terror of death. Deaux compares the survivors to “soldiers . . . who have been in the line so long they no longer know or care if their side is winning or losing or even what the terms mean anymore. . . . [W]ar has become an endless course of terror and fatigue, mutated to a sort of boredom that destroys everything but the body’s motor functions.”
From Paris—and from Normandy, which was also struck in the summer of 1348—the plague spread northward to Rouen, where a new cemetery had to be consecrated to accommodate the dead; to La Graverie, where “bodies . . . decayed in putrefaction on the pallets where they had breathed their last”; to La Leverie, where the family of a noblewoman was unable to find a priest to bury her because the local clergy were all dead and priests from other villages refused to visit one that was flying the black plague flag. At Amiens, burial space was also a problem, until the wandering Philip graciously authorized the mayor to open a new cemetery. In his proclamation, the king declared, “The mortality . . . is so marvelously great that people are dying . . . as quickly as between one evening and the following morning, and often quicker than that.”
In the fall of 1348, as the plague approached Tournai on the Flemish border, a local abbot, Gilles li Muisis, recalled a fifty-year-old prophecy and wondered if still worse was to come. “I have been thinking [recently] about . . . Master Jean Haerlebech,” wrote the seventy-eight-year-old li Muisis. “When I was a young monk he would often speak to me in secret of things, which afterward came to pass.
“. . . He predicted that in 1345 major wars would begin in various places . . . and that in 1346 and 1347 . . . people would not know where to go or where to turn for safety. . . . But he didn’t want to tell me anything about 1350 and I was not able to wring anything out of him.”
Chapter Eight
“Days of Death Without Sorrow”
Southwest England, Summer 1348
IN 1348 ENGLAND’S MORALISTS WERE IN A SOUR MOOD. THE monk Ranulf Higden saw pretension everywhere. These days, thundered Higden, “a yeoman arrays himself as a squire, a squire as a knight, a knight as a duke, and a duke as a king.” The chronicler of Westminster saw an even more pernicious threat—medieval Spice Girls everywhere! Englishwomen, complained the chronicler, “dress in clothes that are so tight, . . . they [have to wear] a fox tail hanging down inside of their skirts to hide their arses.”
However, hardly anyone paid attention to the carping. As mid-century approached, the green and pleasant land of England was in an exuberant mood. The country was flush with military success, awash in French war booty, and best of all, England had a king it could love again. Edward II, the former sovereign, had been a puzzlement to his people. Kings were supposed to like wars, hunting, jousting, and women, but Edward’s tastes had run to theatricals, arts and crafts, minstrels—and men. In a guarded reference to the old king’s homosexuality, a chronicler wrote that Edward loved the knight Piers Gaveston more than his wife, the beautiful French princess Isabella. In a reign marked by military defeat, famine, and political turmoil, Edward, who gained a reputation for being “chicken-hearted and luckless,” lost the support of the English nobility,
and, after a coup by Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, met death in the vilest imaginable manner. According to legend, Edward’s last moments on earth were spent with a hot plumber’s iron in his anus.
The only nice thing the author of
The Reign of Edward II had to say about his subject was that Edward had been remarkably wealthy.
He was also quite handsome, a trait he shared with his son and successor, but otherwise Edward III was everything his father was not: glamorous, romantic, politically deft—and bold. In 1330, at the age of seventeen, Edward seized England’s imagination—and avenged his father’s memory—by bursting into his mother’s bedchamber and arresting the treacherous Mortimer at swordpoint. “Good son, good son, be gentle with dear Mortimer,” the queen pleaded, as her lover was led away in chains. However, it was the victory over the French at Crécy in 1346 that turned Edward III into an English demigod. When the chronicler Thomas Walsingham wrote, “[I]n the year of grace 1348, it seemed to the English that, as it were, a new sun was rising over the land,” he was thinking of the glorious August morning two years earlier when Edward, in a Shakespearean moment, leaped upon his horse in a field outside Crécy and, with the morning sun at his back, “rode from rank to rank . . . desiring every man to take hede . . . [speaking] so sweetly and with so good countenance and merry cheer, that all such as were discomforted took courage.”
