by John Kelly
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Few aspects of mortality scholarship are more fraught with controversy than the question of whether priests died in greater or lesser numbers than the general population. Some historians believe that the clerical mortality was higher because priests as a group were older, and if they performed their duties conscientiously, more likely to be exposed to risk. Other scholars believe that since clerics were better fed and housed, they may have died in slightly smaller numbers than the general population. Even if we take the second position, the ecclesiastic death rates in the county of Lincoln, to the north of East Anglia, are so high, a general death rate of 55 percent for the county seems probable. In the city of Lincoln alone, 60 percent of the beneficed—or salaried—clergy died; in the village of Candleshoe, 59 percent; in Gartree, 56 percent; while another village, Manlake, had one of the highest ecclesiastical death rates in England: an astonishing 61 percent.
Despite the losses sustained by the clergy, the plague weakened the authority and prestige of the institutional Church. To some degree, this was a by-product of disillusionment. For a thousand years, the Church had presented itself as God’s representative on earth. Yet the universal pestilence had shown it to be as powerless, as far from God’s favor, as every other institution in medieval society.
Leading clerics attempted to rationalize away the Church’s impotence by depicting the Black Death as an opportunity for salvation. “Almighty God uses thunder, lightning and other blows . . . to scourge the sons he wishes to redeem,” declared the ever blustery Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury. Another common rationalization was to depict the plague as a necessary and just punishment for a wicked humanity. “O ye of little faith . . . Ye have not repented of your sins . . . therefore I have sent against you the Saracens and heathen people, earthquake, famine, beasts . . . etc. etc.” warned the Heavenly Letter, one of the most widely circulated public documents of the Black Death. But none of the rationalizations was entirely successful. Europe emerged from the plague still a believing society, but after a four-year journey through the heart of darkness, people did not believe in quite the same way they had before.
Neither was the standing of the Church helped by a penchant for blaming the victim, a habit particularly pronouced among the English clergy. “Let us look at what is happening now,” declared the Bishop of Rochester. “We [English] are not stable in faith. We are not honorable in the eyes of the world—on the contrary, we are, of all men, the falsest and in consequence, not loved by God.” Henry Knighton could not have agreed more, though, in Friar Knighton’s view, it was tournament groupies that brought down God’s wrath against the English. The plague, he wrote, was a consequence of the bands of beautiful young women who corrupted public morals by attending tournaments in provocative dress. Admittedly, Knighton was a great crank—upon observing that the pestilence had killed 140 Franciscans in Marseille, he could not resist adding, “And a good job, too!” But even the normally sober John of Reading became a little unhinged on the subject of English tomfoolery. “And no wonder,” John declared, in a passage describing the plague’s arrival, “given the empty headedness of the English, who remained wedded to a crazy range of outlandish clothing without realizing the evil that would come of it.”
Another important factor in the Church’s decline was the postplague state of the clergy, and, again, this trend was particularly pronounced in England. After the Black Death, there were far fewer priests to comfort or minister to the laity, and, since many talented clerics had died, ecclesiastical leadership deteriorated. “At that time,” wrote Knighton, “there was such a dearth of priests that many churches were left without the divine offices, Mass, Matins, Vespers, sacraments and sacramentals.” Compounding the problem of thinned clerical ranks was the greed of many survivors. “One could hardly get a chaplain to serve a church for less than ten pounds or ten marks,” says Knighton. “. . . [W]hereas before the pestilence, when there were plenty of priests, anyone could get a chaplain for five or even four marks.” The low quality of the new clerical recruits also produced disillusionment. Many of the replacements were either very young and ill trained, as in Norwich, where sixty clerks, “though only shavelings” were pushed into vacant rectories, or equally ill-trained middle-aged men, many widowers who had no real vocation.
In many cases, too, the clergy became swept up in the “Lost Generation” spirit. In the postplague years, ecclesiastical discipline slackened and holiness declined. One Franciscan chronicler complained that “the monastic orders, and in particular the mendicants, began to grow both tepid and negligent, both in that piety and that learning in which they had up to this time flourished.”
However, it was the behavior of priests during the plague, not after it, that may have had the most negative effect on the Church. This may seem odd, given the 42 to 45 percent mortality rate among English parish priests, but there may be a ready explanation. While most clerics remained at their posts, many clerics performed their duties in a less than heroic manner. “The picture one forms,” writes Philip Ziegler, “. . . is that of a clergy doing its daily work but with reluctance and some timidity, thereby incurring the worst of the danger but forfeiting the respect it should have earned. Add to this a few notorious examples of priests deserting their flocks . . . and some idea can be formed of why the established Church emerged from the Black Death with such diminished credit.”
North of England, Spring 1349
Above East Anglia, England constricts, as if concentrating its energies for a collision with the rough, borderland Scots. In theory, this narrowness, which keeps the sea very near in the north, should have made the region vulnerable to a waterborne assault, but, initially at least,
Y. pestis seems to have traveled north overland, perhaps with a group of refugees from London, perhaps in a tumbrel of grain. All that is known for certain is that on a dull May morning in 1349, as a spring sun rose above the cathedral, York, the leading city of the north, with a population of almost eleven thousand, began to die.
The northern counties, Lancashire (on the west coast), Yorkshire (on the east), and above them, Cumberland and Durham, had a long time to contemplate their fate. It took the pestilence ten months to reach the region. In the meantime, residents had little to do but plow the fields, listen to rumors from the south, and contemplate the words of William Zouche, Bishop of York. “Almighty God,” thundered the bishop, “sometimes allows those whom he loves to be chastened so that their strength can remain complete by the outpouring of grace in a time of spiritual infirmity.”
Over the winter and spring of 1349, as the rest of England writhed in agony, nature, as if expecting an important new houseguest, was busy preparing the north for the arrival of
Y. pestis. On the last day of 1348, a winter flood submerged the western parishes of York; then, a few days before Passion Sunday, an earthquake rocked the Abbey of Meaux, also in Yorkshire. If modern experience is any guide, both events may have facilitated
Y. pestis’s work by disrupting rodent habitats and sending local rats fleeing toward human settlements.
Compared to the urban areas of Lincoln and Norfolk, the city of York escaped relatively lightly. Clerical losses amounted to 32 percent, 10 percent or more below the national average for parish priests and almost 30 percent below those in Lincoln. The Abbey of Meaux was not so fortunate. The plague claimed forty of its fifty monks and lay brothers, including six victims—among them, the abbot—on the single terrible day of August 12, 1349. While abbeys, with their large complement of unwashed bodies, undiscarded food, and dank corridors, were magnets for rats and fleas, the chronicler at Meaux seemed inclined to think that evil portents were also at work at the monastery. In particular, he mentions the recent death of a pair of Siamese twins, who were “divided from the navel upward . . . and sang together very sweetly” in nearby Kingston-on-Hull. According to the chronicler, “a short time before the pestilence” the twins had died the saddest of imaginable deaths. When one passed on, “the sur
vivor held it in its arms for three days.” And given what happened in Hull, perhaps the twins’ deaths were a portent.
Edward III was abnormally unforgiving about taxes—in one case, he sent seven tax collectors to a post, until finally he found one the plague couldn’t kill—but the pestilence left the twins’ native Hull in such a state of depredation, even the king was moved to pity. “Considering the waste and destruction which our town of Kingston-on-Hull has suffered,” he decided to remit certain taxes back to Hull.
Despite York’s relatively low clerical mortality rate, overall the county of Yorkshire’s losses were in line with the 40 to 50 percent national average. To the west,
Y. pestis may have been more lethal. In the fourteenth century Lancashire, which borders the Irish sea, was one of the most thinly populated regions of England; but a postplague survey of ten local parishes came up with a mortality rate of more than thirteen thousand. In Derbyshire to the south, the most eloquent set of mortality statistics are in a small parish church where a plaque commemorates the Wakebridge family’s brush with annihilation in the summer of 1349.
18 May, Nicholas, brother of William
16 July, Robert, brother of William
5 August, Peter, father of William and Joan, sister of William
10 August, Joan, wife of William and Margaret, sister of William
William himself survived the pestilence.
Another William, the enterprising William of Liverpool, seeing opportunity where others saw only misery, concluded that 1349 was the perfect year to start a funeral business. Documents from medieval Lancashire say that William “caused one third of the inhabitants of Everton [a Lancashire town] to be brought to his house after death,” presumably to be buried at a price.
Durham and Cumberland, the two most northerly counties in England, were accustomed to random death. For more generations than anyone could remember, they had served as the frontline in a series of predatory wars against the Scots, whom the expansionist English could defeat but never quite conquer. In 1352 war-weary and plague-devastated Carlisle, the principal city of Cumberland, was forgiven its taxes, because, according to a royal decree, the town was “more than is usual depressed by the pestilence.” In Durham, a wave of unrest seems to have swept through the county in the summer of 1349. There are reports of peasants refusing to pay fines and refusing to take on the holdings of deceased tenants, but it is unclear whether the refusals were isolated acts or part of some larger, organized movement. Lacking reliable data, we have to deduce morale in the borderlands by an image. It is of a mad, lone peasant who, in the years after the plague, wandered the villages and lanes of the region, calling out for his plague-dead wife and children. The man is said to have greatly upset the populace.
The Scots, still laboring under the impression that the plague was an English phenomenon, were enjoying themselves immensely in the summer of 1349. “Laughing at their enemies . . . [and] swearing ‘by the foul death of England,’” in March 1350 they amassed a large army in the forest of Selkirk near the English border, “with the intention of invading the whole realm.” But before the attack could be launched, “the revenging hand of God” reached across the border and scattered the gathering Scots with “sudden and savage death.”
Henry Knighton enjoyed Selkirk even more than the 140 dead Franciscans in Marseille. “Within a short space of time,” he wrote, “around five thousand [Scots] died and the rest, weak and strong alike, decided to retreat to their own country. But the English following, surprised them and killed many.” The routed Scots took the plague home with them, but
Y. pestis did not take as well to the rough terrain and cooler climate of the Highlands. A third of Scotland may have died, perhaps less. Whatever the exact mortality rate, it was lower than England’s.
For the Welsh, who were already under the English boot, the pestilence brought an end to hope, but not to poetry. In the desperate spring of 1349, as
Y. pestis lapped at the Welsh borderlands north of the Bristol Channel, the poet Jeuan Gethin wrote: “We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling [bubo] in the arm pit; it is seething, terrible, where ever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump . . .”
Beyond the poetry, very little is known about the mortality in Wales, except that it affected both the English colonists—or “Englishry”—in the lowlands, and the natives—the “Welshry”—who lived in the mist-shrouded hills. We also know that, as the plague gathered strength, the Welsh countryside filled with hard men, like Madoc Ap Ririd and his brother Kenwric, who “came by night in the pestilence to the house of Aylmar after the death of the wife of Aylmar and took from the same house one water pitcher and basin, value one shilling . . . [and who also] stole three oxen from John le Parker and three cows, value six shillings.”
In Ireland, which may have been infected in the late summer of 1348 by way of Bristol, contemporary accounts indicate that the pestilence did discriminate between foreigner and native. Geoffrey le Baker observed that in Ireland the plague “cut down the English inhabitants in great numbers, but the native Irish living in the mountains and uplands were scarcely touched.” This observation is echoed in a 1360 report prepared for Edward III; its authors note that the pestilence “was so great and so hideous among the English . . . [but] not among the Irish.” A seventeenth-century Irish historian, perhaps with the atrocities of the Cromwellians still fresh in mind, wrote that while the pestilence “made great havoc among the Englishmen . . . for those who were true Irish-men born and dwelling in hilly countries, it scarce just saluted them.”
The Anglo-Irish tendency to cluster in seacoast towns probably did make them more vulnerable. The plague seems to have landed first on the east coast at Howth or Dalkey, two towns to the north and south of Dublin, then spread to the city itself.
Y. pestis could not have selected better landing sites. Using the cluster of little villages and towns around Dublin as a human bridge, the pestilence quickly vaulted into the more sparsely populated hinterland. By December 1348, Kildare, Leath, and Mouth—three counties around the capital—were infected, and by late summer 1349 the plague was in Clare and Cork on the west coast.
One historian puts the death rate among the Anglo-Irish at 35 to 45 percent; the native Irish probably suffered less, though how much less is unclear. Whatever their death rate, there was more than enough suffering to go around in Ireland in 1348 and 1349.
The final sentence in the manuscript of John Clynn, the Irish monk who wrote “waiting among the dead for death to come,” was written by another monk. It reads: “And Here it seems the author died.”
Chapter Ten
God’s First Love
Lake Geneva, September 1348
ON A SEPTEMBER MORNING IN 1348, AS THE LITTLE VILLAGES OF southern England died in an autumn rain, a small vessel glided across the silvery blue surface of Lake Geneva. In the morning light, the sweeping expanses of sky, sea, and mountain around the boat looked like a backdrop for the Ride of the Valkyries, but there were no great-bodied Norse goddesses on the lake today, just some sleepy local burghers fortifying themselves against the morning chill with a flask of wine—and a surgeon named
Balavigny, who sat alone at the prow of the boat in a funnel-shaped
Judenhut, a Jew’s hat.
The Great Mortality occasioned one of the most vicious outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in European history. The first pogroms in southern France in April 1348 had been traditional acts of Holy Week violence, but during the summer, as the pestilence swept across Europe with unbroken might, the attacks changed character. With fear and unreason everywhere, the Jews, accused of every other sin, were now accused of fomenting the pestilence. By mid-September, when surgeon Balavigny was arrested in the lakeside town of Chillon, the well-poisoning accusation had gro
wn into a conviction—and the conviction into an international Jewish conspiracy, complete with a mastermind, a sinister Spanish rabbi named Jacob; an army of secret agents; and a goal so evil, it filled every Christian heart with fear and trepidation. The Jews were contaminating the wells because they sought world domination.
Over the summer, the conjunction of anti-Semitism, paranoia, and medieval detective work had produced a detailed description of the plot and of the Jewish poison distributed by Rabbi Jacob’s agents, including its packaging and the way it worked. According to one plotter, “if anyone suffering the effects of the poison comes into contact with someone else, especially while sweating, the other person will be infected.” In Chillon, where Balavigny was interrogated after his arrest, local authorities had also obtained information about the agents distributing the poison and the letter Rabbi Jacob sent to coconspirators. According to another plotter, the letter commanded the recipient, “on pain of excommunication and by the obedience he owed the Jewish law, to put the poison in the larger public wells . . .”
When the particulars of the plot were described to him at his first interrogation on September 15, surgeon Balavigny must have felt like Alice upon stepping through the looking glass, though Alice was never “put to the question.” The phrase was a medieval euphemism for torture, and the interrogators at Chillon seemed to have regarded their work with Balavigny as a particularly outstanding example of the torturer’s art. A note on the surgeon’s transcript boasts that after only being “briefly put to the question” on the fifteenth, the surgeon confessed freely and fulsomely to complicity in the well poisonings, and that at a subsequent interrogation on the nineteenth, Balavigny disclosed the names of his coconspirators without being “put to the question” at all.
