The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

  In 1348, Walsingham’s “new sun” also shone over a nation more politically and socially stable than it had been in more than a generation—and more prosperous than one might expect, given the terrible deprivations of the famine years. In 1348 demand for English wool was such that English sheep outnumbered English people—roughly eight million sheep versus six million humans. And there were the first stirrings of an industrial economy—in the west country and East Anglia, where cloth was being made, and in Wales and Cornwall, where coal and tin were being mined. Meanwhile along the coast, the timber-faced waterfronts of Bristol, Portsmouth, London, and Southampton bustled with high-masted ships from Flanders, Italy, Gascony, and the German towns of the Hanseatic League.

  It is impossible to say exactly when in 1348 the plague burst the bubble of English exuberance, but during the early months of the year, the country still seemed in an it-can’t-happen-here frame of mind. In January and February, while Avignon was running out of cemeteries, Edward was at Windsor, redecorating the chapel and coyly avoiding the Germans, who were said to want to offer him the emperor’s crown; meanwhile, his subjects were shamelessly parading around the English countryside in stolen French war booty. “There was no woman of any standing who had not her share of the spoils of Calais, Caen and other places across the Channel,” wrote Walsingham. Strengthening the it-can’t-happen-here mood was the fact that the plague was ravaging France, and the insular English considered the French strange even for foreigners; as one contemporary English writer famously noted, your average Frenchman was effeminate, walked funny, and spent too much time fussing with his hair.

  It is also difficult to say exactly what changed the national mood. Perhaps it was the onset of the rains in early summer. During the second half of 1348, “scarcely a day went by without rain at some time in the day or night.” Maybe, peering into the misty channel that May or June, the English felt a premonitory shudder of dread. Or maybe, more simply, by late spring—with nearly every town on the French side of the channel flying a black plague flag—the danger had become impossible to ignore, even for an island people accustomed to thinking of themselves as a breed apart.

  The summer of 1348 was, like the Battle of Britain summer of 1940, a time of stirring backs-to-the-wall rhetoric. “The life of men upon earth is warfare,” declared the Bishop of York in July. A month later, the Bishop of Bath and Wells warned his countrymen that the apocalypse was nigh. “The catastrophic pestilence from the east has arrived in a neighboring kingdom [France], and it is very much to be feared that unless we pray devoutly and incessantly, a similar pestilence will stretch its poisonous branches into this realm.”

  We don’t know how many people took the bishop’s advice, but however many prayers the English offered to heaven in the rainy summer of 1348, they were not enough. Over the next two years, England would endure the worst catastrophe in its long national life. In the words of the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, between 1348 and 1350:

  One news came straight huddling on another

  Of death and death and death.

  During those two years, perhaps 50 percent of England was consumed in the mortality.*

  To Irish monk John Clynn, it felt as if the end of the world had arrived. Writing in the doomsday year of 1349, Clynn declared, “Waiting among the dead for death to come . . . , [I] have committed to writing what I have truly heard and examined . . . in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Given the level of fear, rumor, and confusion current in the summer of 1348, it is probably inevitable that contemporary reports have

  Y. pestis landing at several different points along the English coast, including at Bristol in the west, Southampton and Portsmouth along the channel coast, and even in the north of England.* However, the weight of historical evidence points to Melcombe, a small port on the southwest channel coast, as the most likely initial landing site. Melcombe is mentioned more often than any other port in contemporary writings, including in the chronicle of Malmesbury Abbey, which says that “in 1348, at about the feast of . . . St. Thomas the martyr [July 7], the cruel pestilence, hateful to all future ages arrived from countries across the sea on the south coast of England at the port called Melcombe in Dorset.” The

  Grey Friar’s Chronicle also says that “In 1348, . . . two ships . . . landed at Melcombe in Dorset before Midsummer. . . . They infected the men of Melcombe who were the first to be infected in England.”

  Today Melcombe is part of Weymouth, a pleasant channel resort town full of Regency architecture, bright seaside shops, towering cliffs, and history. A D-day memorial in the harbor commemorates the thousands of young Americans who left the town on a rainy June morning in 1944 for the beaches of Normandy; and a plaque near the docks commemorates the departure in 1628 of John Endicott, founder of the Salem colony and first governor of New England. However, the most famous moment in local history may have occurred on the north bank of the Wey, the river that runs through the modern town and gives Weymouth its name. In the Middle Ages, the flat alluvial plain above the north bank was occupied by the town of Melcombe, a name that means “valley where milk was got,” or, more simply, “fertile valley,” and that apparently originated with the Durotriges, the Celtic tribe who settled the Dorset coast.

  In the 1340s Melcombe seems to have been larger and more prosperous than medieval Weymouth, which was squeezed into the narrow strip of land between the south bank of the Wey and the rugged Dorset cliffs—a position that gave it the aspect of being perpetually about to tumble into the English Channel. Melcombe boasted a larger fleet than Weymouth, a crowded trading quarter along Bakeres Street—as well as one of the richest men in the county of Dorset, Henry Shoydon, who in 1325 paid an astonishing forty shillings in taxes. A fourteenth-century map shows that in Shoydon’s time Melcombe also had a jetty, where visiting ships unloaded goods. Though it is hard to imagine today, in affluent modern Weymouth—surrounded by picture-taking Japanese tourists, T-shirted teenagers, and sleek young couples down from London—on a summer’s day in 1348, when the sky was heavy with rain, a vessel or several vessels docked at the jetty carrying “death and death and death.”

  The vessel—or vessels—was probably returning from Calais, the scene of recent bitter fighting between the French and the English.* After menacing Paris in early August 1346, and defeating a much larger French force at Crécy, Edward swung north and attacked Calais, a walled city of around twenty thousand on what is left of the land bridge that linked Britain to the continent before the end of the last Ice Age. As fighting around the town degenerated into a brutal siege, little Melcombe, not for the last time, found itself drawn into great events across the channel. A surviving royal order from 1346 shows Edward requisitioning twenty ships and 246 mariners from the town to support the English forces in Calais. Some Melcombe men may even have been present a year later to witness one of the most glorious moments in French history. A committee of Calais’s leading citizens, the Six Burghers, appeared in the English camp and offered their lives if Edward would agree to spare their fellow citizens. The chronicler Jean le Bel says the English were so moved by the burghers’ bravery, “there was not a lord or knight . . . who wasn’t weeping out of pity.”

  Even if Melcombe was not the very first English town to be infected by the pestilence, the links to Calais must have made it a very close second or third. Everything we know about the plague suggests that the French town would have been absolutely toxic with contagion in the summer of 1348. Cramped and walled off to begin with, Calais had just emerged from an eleven-month siege and thus would have been rich in filth, rats, and malnourished humans when

  Y. pestis arrived in the summer of 1348. On top of that, the English were sending home enormous amounts of “liberated” French war booty. “English ladies were proudly seen going about in French dresses” that summer, and English homes were full of French “furs, pillows, . . . linens, clothes and sheets.” Inevitably, some of the “liberated” goods sent home must have carried infe
cted fleas. Additionally, plague-bearing rats most likely slipped into the holds of a few of the Melcombe ships fleeing Calais.

  Whichever way the pestilence arrived, by the end of the summer of 1348, the only sounds to be heard in Melcombe were the patter of rain on thatched roofs and the roar of the pounding surf rising above the cliffs. The sole piece of information we have about the fate of the town is inferential. In the early 1350s Edward declared the island of Portland immediately to the south “so depopulated in . . . the late pestilence that the inhabitants remaining are not sufficient to protect it against our foreign enemies.” Melcombe’s subsequent incorporation into Weymouth suggests that its suffering was even more severe. It is unlikely that the proud townsfolk would have agreed to be incorporated by a smaller and historically less significant Weymouth unless Melcombe had become too weak to sustain itself.

  The lack of a documentary record in Melcombe is unusual. As historian Philip Ziegler notes, contemporary English records “offer a fuller picture of the progress of the Black Death than those [of] any other country.” On the subject of human suffering, the documents—wills, deeds, manor records, clerical appointments, and property transfers—are not particularly enlightening, but they provide an illuminating guide to

  Y. pestis’s movement and behavior. From the pattern of deaths in the records, for example, it is clear how cunningly the plague exploited England’s improving communications network, including the new road networks linking London in the east to Coventry in the midlands and Bristol in the west, and the river networks, which carried a great deal of internal trade. The new ferries and bridges—and the horse, which was replacing the lugubrious ox as a means of haulage—also helped to enhance

  Y. pestis’s mobility.

  As Ziegler has noted, in its precision, the plague’s initial assault on southwestern England resembled a military campaign. To understand how the assault unfolded, a rudimentary geography lesson is necessary. The west coast of England is shaped like a galloping pig in profile. North Wales forms the pig’s floppy ear, central Wales its snout, and the Bristol Channel, below Wales, the space between the pig’s jaw and its outstretched, galloping leg. The leg, which thrusts out into the Atlantic, encompasses the southwest of England. On its ocean side, the region extends down the coast from the Bristol Channel to Land’s End in Cornwall, the most westerly point in England; and on its channel side up the backside of Cornwall and eastward to the neighboring channel counties of Devon and Dorset, where Melcombe is located.

  By the winter of 1348–49, one prong of the pestilence, moving northward from Melcombe, and a second, moving eastward over land from the Bristol Channel (which was infected later in the summer) would intersect, and everything inside the galloping leg would be trapped in a plague pocket.

  The Dorset coast is full of brooding Heathcliff vistas—windswept moors, moody gray skies, furiously moving clouds, turbulent reefs, and towering, chalk-faced cliffs, some so sheer they seem to have been cleaved from continental Europe with an ax. Here and there, nestled amid rock and wind and sea, are dozens of little coastal towns like Melcombe and its neighbors: Poole, Bridport, Lyme Regis, Wareham, and West Chickerell. In the Middle Ages, the towns were all sleepy little places where the same two hundred or three hundred sets of genes would chase one another around for centuries, and the rhythm of daily life was as unalterable as sea and sky. In the rainy autumn of 1348, this predictability begins to shatter. The secular records provide brief glimpses of the plague’s early progress through the coastal southwest, but the ecclesiastical rolls—especially the meticulously kept clerical mortalities—offer the most sustained view.

  In the clerical records, if not in real life, the Black Death begins like a classic English mystery, perhaps an Agatha Christie thriller called

  Who Is Killing the Priests of Coastal England? In October—a few months after

  Y. pestis arrives in Melcombe*—West Chickerell to the north and Warmwell and Combe Kaynes to the east suddenly lose priests; in November the clerical death wave spreads to nearby Bridport, East Lulworth, and Tynham, and in December to Settisbury, also nearby, which has to appoint three priests before finding one who won’t die on the town. John le Spencer was appointed to a clerical post in Settisbury on December 7, 1348; three days later he was succeeded by Adam de Carelton, who in turn was succeeded on January 4 by Robert de Hoven. In the last two months of 1348, thinly inhabited Dorset had to fill thirty-two clerical vacancies—fifteen in November and seventeen in December, an astonishing replacement rate. And the clerical deaths were just the beginning.

  All along the coastal southwest in the black autumn of 1348, the living gathered in the rain to bury the dead. In Poole, to the east of Melcombe, the grave diggers worked to the roar of the pounding surf rolling across the Baiter, a sandy tongue of land converted into a seaside cemetery. In 1348 and early 1349, little Poole seems to have buried the better part of itself in the channel sand. One hundred fifty years later there were still so many abandoned buildings in the town, Henry VIII took time out from his complicated romantic affairs to order their repair. Centuries later, locals were still pointing out the Baiter and regaling visitors with stories of the terrible autumn of 1348, when death and rain howled down upon the town. To the west of Melcombe, in Bridport, which was famous for making the best nautical rope in England, townsfolk buried their dead with a dogged devotion to English legalism. To ensure that every death was properly recorded and processed, in the winter of 1348–49 Bridport doubled its normal complement of bailiffs from two to four. The ecclesiastical records also highlight what may have been the first metastasis of the pestilence. In November and December a sudden burst of clerical deaths in Shaftesbury in central Dorset suggests that the plague was now spreading northward through the incessant rain on an inland route that would carry it through the deer-filled forests and sprawling sheep farms of upper Dorset and into the English midlands.

  In the seventeenth century, Clevedon, Bridgwater, and the other little towns along the Bristol Channel would become the last bit of green England that African slaves saw on their way to the West Indies. But in the gray, wet August of 1348, sorrow and misery sailed in the opposite direction—not out into the blue Atlantic, but up the channel toward Bristol. On a drizzly morning somewhere between August 1 and 15—chroniclers disagree on the date—an infected ship, or ships, probably from Dorset but possibly from Gascony, docked in Bristol harbor. Very shortly thereafter, the town, the largest seaport in the west of England, literally exploded. “Cruel death took just two days to break out all over town. . . . It was as if sudden death had marked [people] down beforehand,” wrote the monk Henry Knighton.

  This was the second prong of

  Y. pestis’s assault, and it quickly turned Bristol into a charnel house. “The plague raged to such a degree,” says one writer, “that the living were scarcely able to bury the dead. . . . At this period,” he adds, “the grass grew several inches high in High Street and Broad Street.”

  According to the

  Little Red Book, a list of local government officials, fifteen of Bristol’s fifty-two city councilors died in 1349, a death rate of almost 30 percent. However, surviving ecclesiastical records suggest that Bristol’s clergy suffered far more grievously; one series of records shows that ten of eighteen local clerical posts had to be filled in 1349—a death rate of about 55 percent. The town historian estimates that 35 to 40 percent of Bristol died in the mortality.

  Below the seaport, in the Bristol Channel town of Bridgwater, the Christmas of 1348 was desolate beyond imagination. The local water mill had stood idle since November, when William Hammond, the miller, died, and the autumn rains had turned the low-lying ground around the town into a swamp, ruining crops and making movement difficult. Then, over Christmas, while Bridgwater prayed for deliverance, the pestilence went on a rampage and killed at least twenty residents at a nearby manor.

  To the north of Bristol, in Gloucester, anxious local officials ordered the town gate closed a
nd all residents of the seaport banned from the town. But later in the fall, when the pestilence came up the road from Bristol—tired, hungry, and eager to get out of the rain—the quarantine proved as useless as it had been in Catania a year earlier. In 1350 someone scrawled Gloucester’s epithet on a church wall: “Miserable, wild, distracted. The dregs of the people alone survive.”

  Sometime between November 1348 and January 1349, the Bristol prong of the pestilence—now thrusting inland on a road network that led eastward across the shires of south-central England to London—and the coastal prong—advancing northward from Dorset into the midlands—crossed paths.

  As the plague pocket snapped shut, the blustery Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury issued what would become one of the most famous pronouncements of the mortality. It was not quite Churchill’s we-will-fight-them-on-the-beaches speech, but Bishop Ralph, whose diocese of Bath and Wells lay trapped at the eastern edge of the plague pocket, was a master rhetorician himself. In January, when even the hopeful had lost hope, the bishop lifted hearts across the diocese with a startling announcement.

  “Wishing, as is our duty, to provide for the salvation of souls and to bring back from their paths of error those who have wandered . . . [w]e declare that those who are now sick or should fall sick in the future . . . if they . . . cannot secure the services of a priest, then they should make a confession to each other as is permitted in the teachings of the apostles . . .”