by John Kelly
Ronewyk was reeve—or manager—at the Hundred of Farnham, one of more than forty manors owned by Bishop Edendon’s diocese of Winchester. Little is known about John’s personal life, but from contemporary documents we can piece together an idea of how he sounded and looked. Like modern German or Spanish speakers, medieval Englishmen pronounced their long vowels, so when John told the dairymaid at Farnham, “I have a liking for the moon,” he would have said, “I hava leaking for the moan.” John also would have been a pretty unprepossessing dresser; his wardrobe probably consisted of one copy of four basic items—breeches (underwear), hose, a shirt, and a kirtle, an all-purpose overgarment. On nights when he was planning a visit to the dairymaid, John’s mother would have ironed his single shirt with a “sleek stone,” a heavy, flat-sided object that she would warm by the fire first. Like many of his contemporaries, John probably slept naked. This common medieval habit must have made the work of
X. cheopis, the rat flea, and
P. irritans, the human flea, a good deal easier.
Farnham, the estate that John managed, was located in Britain’s Champion country. The region, which stretches from southern Scotland to southern England, is one of most fertile areas in the world. Only the Ukraine and parts of western Canada and the United States have the same combination of good soil and clement weather. Today much of Champion country is buried under high streets and mini-marts, but in John’s time, the region was a vast golden sea of wheat and barley, interspersed with neat rows of trees and picturesque little villages of thirty to forty families. Each house was built almost exactly like its neighbor—thatched roof, timber frame, and walls made from wattle and daub—and each village was its own little island world in the vast, swaying grain sea.
In the summer of 1347—the summer before the plague—life in Farnham was better than it had been in decades. Bishop Edendon might have been an irascible character, but in the fourteenth century his well-managed estates were among the few places in England where crop yields were approaching thirteenth-century levels again. There was also more fresh meat and ale on village tables, and many of the vexatious old feudal obligations were beginning to disappear. In a way, 1066 was even being avenged. As mid-century approached, vernacular English, the language of ordinary folk like John, was replacing French, the language spoken by the Norman conquerors of 1066, and the official language of the English aristocracy and government. In the fourteenth century the scholar John Trevisa remarked that, these days, English aristocrats, many of Norman blood, knew “no more French than their left heel.”
With several thousand acres and three to four thousand souls under his care, John Ronewyk was, in effect, managing a good-sized agribusiness. An eleventh-century book called
Gerefa lists a reeve’s principal duties as agricultural management and estate maintenance, but a man like John was also expected to know how everything worked on the manor and to help collect the rents, taxes, and fees due the lord. However,
Gerefa had nothing to say about the problems that John began to encounter in the autumn of 1348, when the pestilence arrived at Farnham.
The timing of
Y. pestis’s appearance is interesting. Farnham lies to the east of Dorset and Wiltshire, near the border between Hampshire and Surrey, yet the manor recorded its first plague deaths around the same time as these more westerly counties. The timing raises two possibilities; either Surrey was infected independently—possibly by sea—or else contemporaries like Bishop Edendon underestimated how quickly the plague spread along the coast. On October 24, while the bishop was issuing his “Rama” warning in Winchester, about twenty-five to thirty miles to the
east, Farnham already had or was about to have its first two plague cases. The manor rolls for 1348 show that two tenants died in October. In November there were three more deaths, and in December, eight. In January the death toll fell to three, and in February to one. The combination of rain, cold weather, and the rapid dash along the wintry English coast had left
Y. pestis winded. In June the mortality rate was still holding at one death per month, but then, in midsummer, when the fields were gold with wheat and the manor barns echoed with buzzing flies,
Y. pestis revived. As July turned into August, “People who one day had been full of happiness, were the next found dead.”
From the fall of 1348 to the fall of 1349, the first year of the pestilence, 740 people died at Farnham—a mortality rate of about 20 percent. As the second winter approached, people no doubt hoped for another reprieve, but this time, energized by the fresh summer air and country sun, the pestilence continued its killing ways through the cold weather. From the fall of 1349 to the fall of 1350, an additional 400-plus residents died. By the time
Y. pestis finally left Farnham in early 1351, the mortality had claimed almost fourteen hundred people at the manor. Since we have only a rough estimate of Farnham’s population, it is difficult to arrive at a percentage figure, but one scholar who examined the rolls estimates that more than a third and perhaps as much as a half of the manor died.
In many other parts of Europe, death on so vast a scale led to great chaos and social dislocation. But except for the wailing that echoed through the manor villages on soft summer nights and the number of people who wore black to church on Sundays, outwardly life at Farnham seemed to change very little. During the first year of the pestilence, the crops were harvested on time and in the usual amounts—Bishop Edendon’s castle received its annual set of repairs, and the ponds got their annual refurbishment. John’s friend, the dairymaid, even made her usual six cloves of butter (a clove equals seven to eight pounds); and after the harvest, the fortunate haymakers received a bonus of four bushels and four quarters of oats. At Christmastime the staff at the bishop’s castle were feted with their traditional three holiday dinners.
Over the winter of 1348–49 Farnham experienced its first plague-related economic dislocations. As manpower shortages developed, labor costs exploded, while the price of farm animals plummeted. “A man could have a horse previously valued at forty shillings for half a mark, a good fat ox for four shillings, and a cow for 12 quid,” wrote a contemporary. The sharp drop in animal prices was rooted in a provision of feudal law that came back to haunt estate owners during the pestilence. When a tenant died, the lord of the manor was entitled to the dead man’s best beast of burden as a death tax. Usually the heriot, as the tax was called, was a boon for the lords, but so many peasants were dying in the winter of 1348–49, estates had more animals than they knew what to do with. John, a shrewd manager, decided to hold on to most of the livestock that had come into Bishop Edendon’s possesion until prices firmed up, but he was the exception. At most manors, “heriot” animals were dumped onto the market, depressing prices.
Thanks to John’s prudence and firm leadership, Farnham prospered during the first year of the plague. Receipts amounted to 305 pounds, while working expenses were only about 43 pounds.
The second year was harder. Death had become so pervasive, whole families were being obliterated now. Forty times that second year, the name of a deceased tenant was read aloud in manor court, and forty times no blood relation came forward to claim his vacant holding. As the “harshness of the days stiffen[ed] men’s malice,” the surviving tenants, John included, began to work two farms, their own and a dead neighbor’s. In a time of death without end, marriage all but vanished. In 1349 there were only four weddings at Farnham.
In 1350 John Ronewyk had less of everything—money, good weather, and labor, which had now become ruinously expensive and very surly. “No workman or laborer was prepared to take orders from anyone whether equal, inferior or superior,” wrote a chronicler. Despite obstacles unimaginable to the author of
Gerefa, in 1350, as in the previous years, John got the crops in on time. In the third year of the pestilence, the harvest was less than it had been in 1349, but not substantially less. In 1350 John’s friend, the dairymaid, even made her usual number of cheeses—26 in win
ter and 142 during the summer—and butter: eight cloves, or roughly fifty pounds.
Bishop Edendon must have marveled at John’s ingenuity. In the midst of one of the bleakest years in all of English history, he organized a small army of tillers, masons, plumbers, carpenters, sawyers, and quarrymen. In l350 the bishop’s manor at Farnham got more than its usual annual refurbishment. Somehow John found the princely sum of twenty-two shillings and five quid to pay the workmen’s inflated wages.
Social cohesion is a complex phenomenon, but applied gently—with a respect for the vast differences in time and place—the Broken Windows theory of human behavior may speak to the relatively low level of upheaval in Black Death England.
The theory, which informs much modern police work, holds that the physical environment buttresses the psychological environment the way a beam buttresses a roof. Why? Broken windows, dirty streets, abandoned cars, boarded-up storefronts, empty grass- and refuse-covered lots send the message: “No one is in charge here.” And when authority and leadership break down, people become more prone to lawlessness, violence, and despair, in the same way that a defeated army becomes more prone to panic if the officers fail to provide resolute leadership.
England in 1348 and 1349 was hardly free of physical or emotional chaos, but enough John Ronewyks stepped forward—to harvest the crops, maintain the land and buildings, keep the records, man the courts—to convey the sense that the country was not slipping into anarchy, that authority was being maintained. Their steady leadership may have helped to sustain order, self-discipline, and lawfulness at a very difficult moment.
Chapter Nine
Heads to the West, Feet to the East
London, Early Fall 1348
A NIGHTTIME WALK ACROSS MEDIEVAL LONDON WOULD PROBABLY take only twenty minutes or so, but traversing the daytime city was a different matter. Crammed into the narrow mile between the malodorous Fleet River (on the western border) and the Tower of London (on the eastern border) were sixty thousand to a hundred thousand turbulent souls, and at least an equal number of noisy chickens, pigs, cows, dogs, cats, oxen, geese, and horses, as well as innumerable tumbrels and carriages. All this mayhem was compressed into lanes barely wide enough for a fat man to turn around in. The chronicler who described London as “among the noble cities of the world” may have been thinking about the capital’s lovely walled gardens and church squares, but he was more likely simply deluded, since even in these islands of tranquillity the insistent din of medieval urban life was only yards away. The city sounds began at first light with the peal of bells, the mournful cries of beasts going to slaughter, and the creak of country carts rolling southward in the chilly dawn air toward Cheapside, London’s premier commercial district. As the morning sun rose above St. Paul’s, the walled city yawned, flung open its gates, and the bounty of the English countryside flowed into the capital from Cow Lane and Chicken Lane and Cock Lane in the northwest suburbs—a place of “pleasant flat meadows, intersected by running waters, which turn revolving mill-wheels with a merry din.”
At the Shambles and at Butchers Row, immediately inside the Newgate entrance to the London wall, goods were triaged: butchers in bloodstained aprons took the large animals in hand for slaughter; other merchandise flowed directly onto Cheapside, a few hundred yards to the south. Imagine a shopping mall where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon, and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road, and you have Cheapside, the busiest, bawdiest, loudest patch of humanity in medieval England. The street was home to more than four thousand individual market stalls, hundreds of musicians and beggars, countless rogues and scalawags, and innumerable gannocks, tapsters, and tranters—roving ale ladies. It may be true, as the chronicler claimed, that “the citizens of London were renowned beyond all others, for ‘their fine manners,’” but none of those well-mannered Londoners lived in Cheapside.
As London’s principal commercial center, Cheapside was also where people came to see and be seen. In the spring of 1348, a visitor might encounter eight-year-old Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Walter Manny, one of Edward’s great captains, taking a constitutional, or John Rykener, who would later achieve notoriety as a prostitute named Eleanor. According to a Corporation of London report, one night after the plague, Rykener “was detected in women’s clothing . . . in a stall near Soper’s Lane committing detestable, unmentionable and ignominious acts with a John Britby.” Britby apparently mistook Rykener for a woman and when he discovered his mistake, concluded that no one was perfect.
If Cheapside pulsated with the bloody energies of the slaughterhouse, the smoky back streets of the capital throbbed to the gritty rhythms of industrial life. “They drive me to death with the din of their dints,” a resident complained of the blacksmiths, who—along with the tanners and dyers, goldsmiths and silversmiths—produced much of the capital’s manufacture. However, the much maligned smithies did make one important contribution to London life: the charcoal, wood, and newfangled sea coal they used in their work were aromatic, and foul London air was in desperate need of aromatic odors. Even by medieval standards, sanitary conditions in the city were appalling. Periodically, the Fleet River, the principal municipal sanitation dump, would be rendered impassable by refuse from the dozens of garderobes, or private outhouses, that lined the river banks like incontinent sentinels, and London’s cesspools were so full, an unfortunate citizen, Richard the Raker, actually drowned in one. Edward III complained that “[t]he air in the city is very much corrupted . . . and most filthy stinks.” However, the principal danger from London’s refuse was not that it smelled, but that it attracted disease-bearing rats.
Next to Cheapside, the busiest place in London was the Thames riverfront. “To this city, from every nation . . . under Heaven, merchants rejoice to bring their trade in ships”—for once, the chronicler did not exaggerate. From a distance, the rows of ostrich-necked cranes and high-masted ships thrusting into the gray London sky above the harbor looked like a primeval forest; closer up, the wood and canvas thicket revealed itself to be inhabited by a sweaty tribe of reedy, foul-mouthed stevedores who swarmed across the docks unloading spices from Italy, wine from Gascony, silks from Spain, linen from France, and timber, fur, iron, and wax from Scandinavia. At night the harbor assumed yet another guise—it became the Kingdom of the Rat. While London slept, thousands of hungry rodents, their wet noses twitching in the cool night air, would follow the fetid London odors out of the stilled ships, across the docks, and into the darkened city beyond.
In 1348, once a southbound traveler crossed London Bridge, the only bridge over the Thames, he was out of the city and in Southwark, a squalid little suburb of narrow streets, small workshops, petty criminals, and alleyway sex. When London banned prostitution, the capital’s sex workers relocated to Southwark, where they became known as “Winchester geese,” in honor of the town’s one architectural grace note, the Bishop of Winchester Park.
London’s other major suburb, Westminster, lay about a mile to a mile and a half to the west of the bridge, and it was famous for its great abbey, and for Westminster Palace (the king’s residence), as well as for being a sanctuary for wrongdoers. Since the eleventh century, when the village became the seat of the English Crown, Westminster had witnessed many dramatic moments, but none of equal gravity to that of September 1348, when the pestilence was rushing toward London inland from Bristol and Oxford and along the coast from Wiltshire and Hampshire. That September, one imagines scenes of high drama at Westminster Palace: Edward III and his ministers anxiously studying maps; clerks furiously scribbling orders; messengers scurrying from office to office; and arriving horsemen shouting out the latest news from the fronts at Hampshire and Bath and Winchester.
During the Great Mortality, England continued to be governed vigorously. The royal courts and the Exchequer (Treasury) remained open, tax collectors collected taxes, and the diligent king kept an eye on everything from the French to rising wages, which he froze in 1349 and
again in 1351. However, Edward’s initial response to the mortality lacked his characteristic boldness. September 1348 found the king in a moody, brooding silence. Probably the loss of Princess Joan, who had died earlier that month, weighed heavily on him, but one English historian, Professor William Ormrod, thinks that initially Edward—and his ministers—underestimated the dangers of the pestilence. During the fall, says Professor Ormrod, the government seems to have gone from one extreme to the other: from apathy and indifference to something akin to panic. In December Edward retreated to the countryside; shortly thereafter he sent up to London for his relics and ordered the parliamentary session scheduled for January 1349 canceled.
According to most contemporary accounts, the plague arrived in the capital on a rainy early November morning, but from whence it came remains unclear. Geoffrey le Baker, an Oxfordshire clerk, suggests the city was infected via the Bristol prong of the pestilence; in le Baker’s account, the epidemic spreads eastward across the shires of south-central England to “Oxford and London.” An invasion by way of Kent, the coastal county to the south of London, is also a possibility. However, since London seems to have been infected before the surrounding countryside, the most probable source of infection is the sea. A visiting ship may have deposited the plague bacillus on the Thames docks, and from there
