by John Kelly
Y. pestis launched an all-points attack.
Surprisingly for the city of Shakespeare and Dickens, London produced no great plague chroniclers on the order of Agnolo di Tura or Giovanni Boccaccio. But Thomas Vincent’s evocative description of London during a later outbreak of plague suggests what the city must have been like in the terrible winter and spring of 1349. “Now, there is a dismal solitude,” wrote Vincent. “Shops are shut . . . people rare, very few walk about . . . and there is a deep silence in almost every place. If any voice can be heard, it is the groans of the dying, and the funeral knell of them that are ready to be carried to their graves.” Daniel Defoe, who survived the Great Plague of London (1665) as a child, conjures up an even more terrible picture of daily life in the city. In some people, wrote Defoe, “the plague swellings . . . grew so painful . . . not able to bear the torment, they . . . threw themselves out of windows. Others, unable to contain themselves, vented their pain by incessant roarings. Such loud and lamentable cries were to be heard as we walked along the streets that would pierce the very heart to think of.”
However, the only people who know firsthand what happened in Black Death London are the dead, and not long ago they were interviewed by a group of British archaeologists. In the mid-1980s, as rush-hour traffic whizzed by overhead, the archaeologists descended into a plague pit dozens of feet below the modern city. If a measure of a civilized society is the ability to bury its dead with dignity, then evidence from the plague pit suggests that civilization held in London.
The mixture of caskets, shrouds, individual graves, and trenches at the site indicates that on days when the dying was light, an effort was made to observe traditional burial rites; people got individual graves and some kind of funeral. Even on days when the death carts came back full and there was no time for ritual, bodies were not simply tossed willy-nilly into a pit. Some of the plague dead in the trenches were buried in caskets and shrouds, and everyone was laid out the same way: side by side, heads to the west, feet to the east. An effort may even have been made to segregate plague victims by age and gender. When archaeologists excavated the middle section of one trench, dozens of London children gazed up into the English sky for the first time in seven hundred years.
The charcoal and ash found in many coffins and shrouds also speaks to the order and organization of civilization. Since both ash and charcoal can help slow the putrefaction process, it may be that on days when the dying was heavy, rather than just toss corpses into a sea of elbows and knees and upturned buttocks, the grave diggers stockpiled plague fatalities for proper burial the following day. Another possibility is that corpses were preserved because a triage system was in operation. This occurred during the Great Plague of 1665, when the dead were transported across the city to cemeteries.
To determine how many Londoners perished, it is also necessary to interview the dead at another, more famous mortality burial site. In 1348 Ralph Stratford, the Bishop of London, “bought a piece of land called No Man’s Land” northwest of the city, amid the “pleasant flat meadows” of West Smithfield. A year later, Sir Walter Manny, a famous veteran of the French wars, expanded the site by purchasing “thirteen acres and a rod adjoining . . . the said ‘No Man’s Land.’” The Smithfield site is, by far, the largest Black Death cemetery in London, but how large has been a matter of controversy for centuries.
Robert of Avesbury, who clerked for the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims that the pestilence “grew so powerful [in London] that between Candlemas [February 2, 1349] and Easter [April 12], more than two hundred corpses were buried almost every day in the new burial ground made next to Smithfield.” A sixteenth-century historian named John Stow claims that, in his time, the cemetery bore the inscription, “A great plague raging in the year 1349 a.d., this churchyard was consecrated; wherein . . . were buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead.” Smithfield cemetery has long since disappeared under urban sprawl, but, even assuming Stowe’s memory was accurate, the figure of fifty thousand burials sounds astonishingly high. Assuming medieval London had a population of a hundred thousand—the high end of current estimates, once the plague dead in the city’s hundred-plus regular cemeteries are included, London’s overall mortality rate would have to have been in the 65 to 80 percent range—highly unlikely. Assume London had a population of sixty to seventy thousand—the low end of current estimates—and the city would have been virtually depopulated by August 1349.
Since medieval statisticians were given to terrific flights of fancy,* probably what the plague’s author meant to say is that a great many people were buried at Smithfield. A recent estimate puts the cemetery’s population at seventeen thousand or eighteen thousand and London’s overall mortality rate at twenty thousand to thirty thousand, with thirty thousand being the more probable figure. If medieval London had seventy thousand souls, a reasonable estimate, that would mean a death rate of close to 50 percent.
Some historians believe the plague in London may have followed the pattern in Avignon—pneumonic in winter, bubonic in the spring and summer—though firm evidence on this point is lacking. Contemporary sources are more helpful on the question of who died. In London
Y. pestis seems to have killed with egalitarian abandon, claiming no fewer than two archbishops of Canterbury, John Offord and his successor, Thomas Bradwardine, and numerous members of the royal household, including the king’s physician, Roger de Heyton, and the wayward guardian of Princess Joan, Robert Bourchier, who had escaped the plague in Bordeaux only to die in London. In a fit of antiunionist frenzy, the pestilence also struck down the leaders of many of the city’s powerful trade guilds, including eight wardens from the Company of Cutters, six wardens from the Hatters Company, and four wardens from Goldsmith Company.
The plague also claimed twenty-seven monks at Westminster Abbey, and the number would have been twenty-eight had not the hot-tempered, disagreeable Abbot Simon de Bircheston fled to his estate in Hampshire, to no avail. During its sweep through coastal England, the plague stopped in Hampshire and killed him.
In the waning months of the pestilence, Cheapside emptied and the Shambles fell quiet as farmers began to boycott the capital for fear of infection. There were now so few people, even with the boycott, the second Horseman of the Apocalypse, Famine, could gain no purchase. A 1377 poll tax assessment put the population of the postplague capital at thirty-five thousand.
Had the assessors examined London’s moral state, they would have found that it, too, had fallen precipitously. John of Reading, a Westminster monk, observed that in the years following the pestilence, priests, “forgetful of their profession and rule, . . . lusted after things of the world and of the flesh.” The cackling Henry Knighton noted that many highborn women “wasted their goods and abused their bodies.” A similar moral decline was evident elsewhere in postplague Europe and the Middle East. “Civilization,” noted the Muslim scribe Ibn Khaldun, “both in the East and West was visited by a destructive plague. . . . It swallowed up many of the good things . . . and wiped them out. . . . Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. . . . The entire world changed.”
In
On Thermonuclear War, one of the most exhaustive studies ever conducted on the effects of nuclear war, strategist Herman Kahn states, “Objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors.” The aftermath of the plague suggests that Dr. Kahn’s assessment of postapocalyptic life may be half right. Survivors of the mortality did indeed rebuild their lives and their societies, but as the poem “The Black Death of Bergen” observes, the memory of what they had endured never left them:
Sights that haunt the soul forever
Poisoning life til life is done.
Writing in the aftermath of World War I, James Westfall Thompson, a University of Chicago psychiatrist, noted several parallels between the Lost Generation of the Great War and the gene
ration that lived through the Black Death. “The superficial yet fevered gaiety, the proneness to debauchery, the wild wave of extravagance, the gluttony—all these phenomena [are] readily explicable in terms of the shock and trauma of the Great War,” declared Dr. Thompson, and all have parallels in the behavior of the plague generation.
East Anglia, Spring 1349
On a map, the eastern coast of England forms a reasonably straight line down from Yorkshire to the Wash, a large bay on what the Victorians used to call the German Ocean (otherwise known as the North Sea). Below the Wash, the coast suddenly boils out like a head bursting though a wall; that cartographical illusion is East Anglia.
Perhaps because the ocean and sky always seem to beckon, the region has long been a departure point for the restless. In the seventeenth century, colonists from Norfolk and Suffolk, East Anglia’s two counties, helped to settle New England, bringing with them not only many local place-names, including Yarmouth, Ipswich, Lynn (Massachusetts), Norwich, and Norfolk (Connecticut), but the speech patterns that gave rise to the Boston accent. However, well before East Anglia discovered the New World, it discovered how to make an unpromising environment blossom. In the years before the plague, the peasants of fertile Champion Country watched in awe as their counterparts who lived along the German Ocean transformed a land of light sandy soils, moody skies, and small, uneconomic farms into the most densely cultivated region of England.
In the fourteenth century, East Anglians who did not farm made cloth, the major industry in the region. In hundreds of towns and villages across Norfolk and Suffolk, the
thwack! of the fuller and his “stocks” echoed from dawn to dusk. Charged with cleaning and thickening wool before it was spun, the fuller borrowed his techniques from wine making and the Inquisition. A fuller spent half the day in a trough of water, jumping up and down on a pile of wool; the other half, beating the wool senseless with a wooden bar—the “stocks”—until it surrendered the necessary degree of spotlessness and thickness.*
By the eve of the plague, East Anglia had grown into the most populous area of England, and its leading commercial center, Norwich—the suffix “wic,” as in Nor
wich and Ips
wich, is an ancient designation for trading place—had become the second city of the realm, with a population of perhaps twenty thousand, many of them descendants of peoples who lived on the other side of the German Ocean. In Roman times, the fierce Saxons invaded so often, legionnaires called the region the Saxon Shore, and the Saxons were followed in the ninth and tenth centuries by the even fiercer Vikings. But the fiercest conqueror in East Anglia history came not by longboat, but by tumbrel or cart or saddlebag. Sometime around the Ides of March 1349,
Y. pestis came up the road from London, and by the time it left, East Anglia, like Florence and Siena and Avignon, had experienced the equivalent of a thermonuclear event.
Though many regions of England suffered grievously in the mortality, it is hard to dispel the notion that, in the east of England in general and in East Anglia in particular, the suffering achieved a horrible new intensity. It was almost as if, unhinged by the bloodletting in the narrow, fetid lanes of Bristol and London and Winchester,
Y. pestis had forgotten the first rule of survival for an infectious disease: leave some survivors behind to carry on the chain of infection. In most of England, plague mortalities seem to have ranged from 30 to 45 percent; in the counties along the German Ocean, the average may have been nearer 50 percent, and in some places along the coast, higher. Dr. Augustus Jessop, the Victorian historian, author of what still remains the most comprehensive examination of East Anglia, wrote that in the “year ending 1350, more than half the population . . . was swept away. . . . [And] if any one should suggest that
many more [italics added] than half died, I should not be disposed to quarrel with them.”
By 1377 the population of Norwich had shrunk from a preplague high of about twenty thousand to under six thousand. As in Winchester and London, not all the missing residents died of plague, but the holocaust in the city was so great, for centuries after, the Black Death haunted civic memory. In 1806 a historian wrote that in 1349 Norwich “was in the most flourishing state she ever saw and more populous than she hath been ever since.” Great Yarmouth, the leading seaport of East Anglia, also bore the plague’s scars for centuries. You can almost hear the wind whistling through the empty streets in a sixteenth-century report prepared for Henry VII. “Most . . . of the dwelling places . . . of [Yarmouth],” wrote the authors, “stood desolate and fell into utter ruin and decay.”
The fact that the valley of the Stour in lower Suffolk was among the first places in East Anglia to be struck supports the notion of London as the source of infection. The capital is only forty to forty-five miles to the south. While those miles were a good deal longer in 1349 than they are today, it still seems odd to find the peasants of Conrad Pava, a medium-sized estate in the valley, arguing about land and dowries—as manor court records show—as the year opened. People must have been thinking about pestilence. Indeed, with London so close, they were probably thinking of little else. Perhaps that bleak January, residents found comfort in arguing about the traditional issues of manor life.
By the time the manor court convened once again in March, the mortality had become impossible to ignore. The names of nine plague victims—six men and three women—are entered in court records. Such a large number of deaths in so short a time must have given rise to hopes that the worst was over, but the worst had not even begun. On May 1, when the manor court met for its third session of the year, fifteen new deaths were recorded—thirteen men and two women. Seven of the deceased left no heirs; at Conrad, as at Farnham, whole families were obliterated. In the summer of 1349, while London buried the last of its dead, the mortality peaked on the manor, producing more victims. On November 3, at the last court of the year, thirty-six new deaths were recorded; this time thirteen of the deceased left no heirs. In six months, twenty-one families on a manor of perhaps fifty families had been wiped out.
In April, in the little village of Heacham in Norfolk, near the western coast of the German Ocean, the pestilence intruded on Emma Goscelin’s life with the randomness of a stray bullet. A month earlier, as
Y. pestis was traveling north under the remains of a late winter sky, Emma and her husband, Reginald Goscelin, were engaged in a bitter dispute over Emma’s dowry. The court rolls are unclear about the cause of the dispute—perhaps Reginald was a wastrel who squandered Emma’s money on the local ale ladies. Whatever he did, Emma was mad enough about it to take him to court. The case of Goscelin v. Goscelin was scheduled to be heard at manor court in Heacham on April 23, 1349, and Emma was not planning to attend court alone. Records indicate that several witnesses had agreed to testify on her behalf. That spring, if Reginald probably thought his life could not possibly get any worse, he was wrong. On April 23, Emma had to tell the court that the errant Reginald was dead, as were all her witnesses.
In Norwich, the epicenter of the storm, the dead quickly began to outnumber the living. Think of the survivors, writes Dr. Jessop, with only a touch of Victorian hyperbole, “threading [through] the filthy alleys, . . . stepping back into doorways to give the death carts passage, . . . [being] jostled by lepers and outcasts.” Think, he continues, of the city’s cemeteries: “Tumbrels discharging their load of corpses all day long, tilting them in huge pits made ready to receive them; the stench of putrefaction palpitating through the air . . . [people] stumbling over the rotting carcasses . . . breathing all the while the tainted breath of corruption.”
As elsewhere in England, in East Anglia the social order held, although there was enough postapocalypse lawlessness to give point to G. B. Neibuhr’s assertion that in “times of plague . . . the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand.” Probably no one better illustrates Neibuhr’s point than William the One-Day Priest, an errant cleric who robbed six days a week and celebrated Mass on t
he seventh. Among those to run afoul of One-Day William was Matilda de Godychester, who was relieved of her purse and a ring in Epping forest. Later, Matilda told a court she was happy to escape with her life. Also active in the postplague era was the con artist Henry Anneys, whose specialty, tax avoidance schemes, would make him right at home today. One day in the early 1350s, Henry showed up at the door of Alice Bakeman, no paragon of virtue herself. Hearing that Alice wanted to avoid paying a heriot, or death tax, on some inherited property, the silky Henry proposed a trade—one of his best tax schemes for one of Alice’s best milking cows. Henry got his cow, and Alice her scheme, but, alas—and probably predictably—the tax authorities saw through the scheme and Alice had to pay the heriot.
William Sigge was as low as Henry Anneys was cunning. William’s crimes included stripping lead from one dead neighbor’s roof, stealing pots and pans from another dead neighbor’s cottage, and altering the boundary of a third dead neighbor’s farm, so as to extend his own property. By all rights, Catherine Bugsey, who also preyed on the dead, should have been dead herself, at least ten times over; Catherine’s specialty was stealing clothing from plague victims. But when arrested in her latest acquisition, a leather jerkin, Catherine was the picture of health.
After the sixth-century Plague of Justinian, the historian Procopius observed, “Whether by chance or Providential design, [the pestilence] strictly spared the most wicked.”
In East Anglia, history seems to have repeated itself.
