by Robert Lacey
Recent medical research shows that some effects of the Black Death have lasted into present times. Doctors researching the AIDS epidemic have discovered that there are certain, relatively rare, people who will never come down with AIDS, however much they are exposed to it. What these people have in common has been identified as a gene mutation known as CCR5-delta 32, found mostly in white Europeans and especially in Swedes. Doctors suspect that the ancestors of these people were precisely those who were infected and managed to survive the plagues of the fourteenth century. The mutation does not appear to exist in African and East Asian populations that did not suffer the Black Death.
Bubonic plague - identified by its underarm swellings - still exists today. It can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed early enough, but two thousand deaths are reported worldwide each year, and a recent case in Madagascar showed a worrying resistance to antibiotics. AIDS, SARS, deadly influenza epidemics - the plagues are still with us.
THE BEDSIDE MANNER OF A PLAGUE DOCTOR
AD 1376
JOHN ARDERNE MADE HIS REPUTATION BY devising a treatment for an embarrassing ailment that was suffered by many in the age of chivalry. Knights spent hours, days, even months in the saddle - the mounted heroes of Crécy bumped their bottoms all the way to France and back. Fistula in ano, an unpleasant abscess between the base of the spine and the anus, was an occupational hazard of their apparently glamorous profession, and Arderne developed a surgical technique for treating it. He cut out the abscess, using opiates to deaden the pain, and wrote up his method in a precisely illustrated treatise of 1376 that ranks as one of the earliest professional medical articles. The basic principles of his treatment are followed by surgeons to this day.
Arderne learned his craft as a doctor by tending to the wounds of English soldiers in the French wars, and he favoured experimentation. He prided himself on knowing better than the old medical dogmas dating back to Greek times, though he did acknowledge that he had made some mistakes early on. On one occasion he tried sprinkling leg wounds with powdered arsenic that ate away at the bone. Fortunately for Arderne, suing for compensation was not yet a national pastime. People were well aware they could die in almost any medical situation, and were grateful for whatever help the doctor could give them.
After the failure of his arsenic powder, Arderne concocted gentler dressings using mutton fat, which he christened salus populi, the ‘balm of the people’, and he came to specialise in herbal remedies. His remedy for gout was a poultice of green laurel and honey mixed with the lard of a male pig - he claimed to have cured a gouty abbot overnight with a single application - and his remedy for kidney stones was a plaster of pigeon’s dung and honey applied hot to the body. These cures might sound outlandish to modern ears, but his patients came back for more, and the astrological spells that he used while dispensing his treatments seem to have had a calming effect. One of his most popular was a charm he originally came up with to tackle the hangovers suffered by the guests who caroused too freely at the wedding of Lionel, the Black Prince’s younger brother. The hangover cure worked so well he tried it for epilepsy, and reported success.
The good doctor should not boast, advised Arderne, nor should he pass comment on his colleagues. It was better to err on the safe side when discussing prospects of recovery, and he should always be modest and discreet. Also, he should always keep his nails clean. When it came to fees, the rich should be charged as much as possible - high fees inspired their confidence - and while the poor should be treated free as a matter of professional prestige, there was no harm done if they provided the odd chicken or duck.
When attending the bedside, there was nothing wrong in deploying a little flattery, and better still if the doctor could tell a few good stories that would make the patient laugh. It induced anxiety in a patient if the physician took his relatives aside to whisper in a corner, nor should he be too familiar with ‘fair women in great men’s houses’. He should certainly avoid greeting them in public by thrusting his hands about their bosoms - which would seem, on the face of it, to raise the question of what form a private greeting from the jolly Dr Arderne might take.
When it came to the plague, Arderne did not pretend to have a solution. He offered patients who suffered from heart attacks an expensive cure that involved gold dust and a powder made from pearls. But he advised his colleagues to try to avoid hopeless cases as a matter of principle. An honest doctor risked losing his fee and his reputation - and, worse, could find himself accused of poisoning.
John Arderne was proudest of the remedies he devised for the battlefield, and particularly a salve for arrow wounds that he called ‘sangue d’amour’ - the blood of love. This ideally required the blood of a maiden aged twenty, drawn at the full moon in Virgo (mid-August to mid-September).
It would then be mixed with myrrh, aloes and other ingredients before being boiled up with olive oil. But the doctor had confected a red powder to take the place of the maiden’s blood - ‘for now,’ he explained, ‘in this time, virgins come full seldom to twenty years’.
THE DREAM OF PIERS THE PLOUGHMAN
AD 1377
One summer season when the sun was warm, I rigged myself out in shaggy woollen clothes as if I were a shepherd; and in the garb of an easy-living hermit I set out to roam far and wide through the world, hoping to hear of marvels. But on a morning in May, among the Malvern Hills, a strange thing happened to me, as though by magic. For I was tired out by my wanderings, and as I lay down to rest under a broad bank by the side of the stream, and leaned over gazing into the water, it sounded so pleasant that I fell asleep. And I dreamt a marvellous dream . . .
SO BEGINS PIERS THE PLOUGHMAN, A RAMBLING epic poem that takes a stroll through plague-stricken England in the declining years of Edward III. We read of monks and friars, proud barons and burgesses in fur-trimmed coats, poor parish priests who can no longer scrape a living from their death-diminished parishes, and, of course, a ploughman. Piers is a brave, plain-spoken innocent, a good-hearted man of the people, who seeks to make sense of the world.
Piers the Ploughman was the life’s work of William Langland, a quirky and impoverished churchman who spent many years working and reworking his saga, his one and only known creation, in colloquial verse. Langland grew up in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire where his first ‘vision’ is set, but then moved to London to scratch a living by singing masses for the souls of the rich and transcribing legal documents. He must have had some difficulty in supporting his wife Kit and their daughter Collette in their cottage in Cornhill, between London Bridge and the modern Bank of England. He himself features prominently in the poem - he is the dreamer - and the poem is the source for just about all that we know about him. ‘Long Will’ describes himself as tall, lean and disrespectful. He sometimes dressed in rags like a beggar so that he could experience the life of the poor, and when he encountered pompous or self-important people he would take pride in being disrespectful.
In his very first vision, Langland dreams of a gathering of rats and mice that are terrified of an overbearing cat who is playfully batting them about - ‘scratching and clawing us and trapping us between his paws until our lives are not worth living’. At the suggestion of one elderly rat they solemnly debate the old folk-fable idea of securing a bell to the monster’s collar in order to protect themselves against it, but end up with the famous dilemma - ‘Who will bell the cat?’
‘Now what this dream means,’ says Langland, ‘you folk must guess for yourselves, for I haven’t the courage to tell you.’
The guess was an easy one for Langland’s fourteenth-century readers. The poet was referring to the parliaments of his time. The cat was the King - the ageing and ailing Edward III, on the throne for more than half a century. The rats and mice were the knights and burgesses who made up Parliament.
After Crécy, the war with France had gone well for a while. In 1356 the Black Prince, who had taken over England’s armies on behalf of his father, won a brilliant v
ictory at Poitiers against all the odds. The French King John II was actually captured and held to ransom. But since 1369 it had been all downhill, with retreats and loss of territories. The Black Prince fell ill, and the senile Edward III had fallen under the influence, since the death of his wife Philippa, of his mistress Alice Perrers. The royal demands for taxes kept on coming, and all this amid the strain and turmoil of the Black Death.
In 1376 the ‘Good Parliament’, as they boldly called themselves, had tried to stop the rot. They elected themselves a Speaker - Parliament’s first - who presided over business that included scathing attacks on royal ministers and favourites, Alice Perrers among them. The Commons expected the King to ‘live off his own’, they declared, and not to assume he could just go on squeezing his people - hence the wise old rat’s idea of a ‘bell’. But no sooner had Parliament broken up than the ‘cat’, in the form of Edward’s younger son John of Gaunt, had had the Speaker arrested and the Acts of the Good Parliament annulled.
‘Even if we kill the cat,’ remarks one of Langland’s mice cynically, ‘another like him would come to scratch us, and it would be no use our creeping under the benches. I advise all commoners to leave him alone and let’s not be so rash as even to show him the bell.’
Piers the Ploughman was less a political tract than a spiritual adventure. Langland’s vision was that life’s purpose is the seeking of truth, and that truth when explored turns out, rather beautifully, to be the same as love, dwelling in the human heart. But this unconventional man who dressed as a beggar to sample the life of the disadvantaged had a keen eye for injustice, and there are angry passages in his poem that give us a unique view of how some people lived in late fourteenth-century England:
The poorest folk are our neighbours if we look about us - the prisoners in dungeons and the poor in their hovels, overburdened with children, and rack-rented by landlords. For whatever they save by spinning they spend on rent, or on milk and oatmeal to make gruel and fill the bellies of their children who clamour for food. And they themselves are often famished with hunger, and wretched with the miseries of winter - cold sleepless nights, when they get up to rock the cradle cramped in a corner and rise before dawn to card and comb the wool, to wash and scrub and mend . . .
There are many more who suffer like them - men who go hungry and thirsty all day long, and strive their utmost to hide it - ashamed to beg, or tell their neighbours of their need. I’ve seen enough of the world to know how they suffer, these men who have many children and no means but their trade to clothe and feed them. For many hands are waiting to grasp the few pence they earn, and while the friars feast on roast venison, they have bread and thin ale, with perhaps a scrap of cold meat or stale fish.
In the story of Piers the Ploughman, as in the brief poem of Caedmon the cowherd, we get a rare chance to hear the early voice of an ordinary Englishman - transfused in Langland’s case with a burning anger. It would not be long before this voice of the people - and their anger - would be more loudly heard.
THE ‘MAD MULTITUDE’
AD 1381
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then a gentleman?
JOHN BALL’S QUESTIONING AND PROVOCATIVE couplet excited the crowds gathered on the green heights of Blackheath overlooking London in the early summer of 1381. As the fiery preacher conjured up the image of Adam, the original man, painfully delving— or digging - in the fields, while his wife laboured with her spindle in their mud-and-wattle hovel, twisting piles of sheep’s wool into yarn, his audience knew exactly what he was getting at.
‘In the beginning,’ cried Ball, ‘all men were equal. Servitude of man to man was introduced by the unjust dealings of the wicked. For if God had intended some to be servants and others lords, He would have made a distinction between them at the beginning.’
John Ball’s sermon was inspired by a plague-stricken land. His restive audience had dutifully obeyed both the lord of the manor and their Lord in heaven, and they had been punished with death - in 1348, 1361, 1368, 1374 and again five years later. But they also had a self-confidence and assertiveness they had not known before, since, by the brutal laws of economics, the survivors of the plague years were actually better off than they had ever been. A drastically reduced labour force meant higher wages - and if you could scrape together some savings, you could also pick up land cheaply. Modern archaeologists have noticed how smart metal utensils began to replace earthenware pots in quite ordinary homes during these years. Higher living standards, lower rents, a more diversified economy - all this from a flea on a rat’s back. And with these changes came a resonating cry for social justice.
‘What can they show,’ asked Ball, ‘or what reasons give why they should be more the masters than ourselves? Except, perhaps, in making us labour and work, for them to spend.’
The Great Rising of 1381 sought to break the cycle of feudal bondage, the system whereby men gave their labour and their loyalty - and, in many ways, their very being - to the local lord of the manor in return for land and protection. For this reason later generations called the uprising the Peasants’ Revolt.
But to judge from the records, it might better have been called the Ratepayers’ Revolt, since the ledgers of the time show that the leaders and mouthpieces of the rebellion like John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw were substantial, tax-paying folk. Anything but peasants, they came from the upwardly mobile yeoman classes. They were village leaders who sat on juries - and their rebellion first exploded not in the poor and downtrodden areas of England but in the very richest counties, the fruitful orchards of Kent and Essex, close to London with its alluring wealth and progressive ideas.
Discontent had been stirred by a general conviction that things were awry at the top. Edward III had died in 1377, after the debacle of the ‘Good Parliament’, leaving the throne to his ten-year-old grandson Richard II. ‘I heard my father say,’ remarked one of William Langland’s dream mice, ‘that when the cat is a kitten the court is a sorry place.’
While Richard was a child, the court was in the hands of his uncle John of Gaunt, so named because he was born during a royal visit to Ghent in the Low Countries. Gaunt lacked the charisma of his elder brother, Richard’s father, the Black Prince, whose premature death was the more mourned because he was widely thought to be a reformer - and Gaunt positively prided himself on his lack of the common touch. ‘Do they think that they are kings and princes in this land?’ he had asked as he annulled the reforms of the Good Parliament. ‘Have they forgotten how powerful I am?’
Gaunt had maintained the dreary pursuit of war with France and Scotland, and the huge expenditure that this necessitated had kept the tax demands coming. The final provocation was the poll tax of 1380 - the third in four years. ‘Poll’ meant ‘head’ (thus counting per head, the same word we use for elections), and it was a new way of raising money. Previously, taxes had been levelled per household. They were known as ‘tenths’, ‘thirteenths’ or ‘fifteenths’, reflecting the fraction of your household wealth you were expected to pay. Now people were supposed to pay according to the number of heads polled in their homes - which automatically doubled your tax burden if you were married, and increased it still more if you had parents living with you, or children over the age of fourteen.
Not surprisingly, many people had conveniently ‘lost’ members of their family when the tax collectors called. Between 1377 and 1381, the Exchequer was faced with a mysterious fall of 33 per cent in the adult population, and correctly suspecting tax evasion, the government sent out fresh teams of examiners, with powers of arrest and escorts of armed guards, to root out the hidden evaders.
It was the arrival of one such commission in the Essex town of Brentwood at the end of May 1381 that provided the spark for rebellion. Led by John Bampton, the local Member of Parliament, the commissioners started summoning representatives from the area to account for the deficits in their payments. But those from the villages of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope f
elt they were being threatened. They refused to cooperate, and when Bampton’s armed escort attempted to arrest the villagers there was uproar. The tax commissioners were expelled from Brentwood, and Bampton fled to London in fear for his life.
Within days, much of Essex had risen in rebellion. Several thousand protesters headed for London, while down in Kent the standard of revolt was flown by Wat Tyler, who then lived in Maidstone but had earlier lived in Essex. Tyler may have been a link between the surprisingly well coordinated uprisings now occurring in these counties to the north-east and south-east of the capital.
On Monday 10 June, Tyler led some four thousand rebels to Canterbury, where they broke into the cathedral during the celebration of high mass, demanding that the monks depose the Archbishop Simon Sudbury. Sudbury was a leading member of the government, and Tyler’s followers denounced him as ‘a traitor who will be beheaded for his iniquity’. During these years, radical religious thinking was marching in step with social revolution. The Oxford philosopher John Wycliffe was teaching that men could find their own path to God without the help of priests, whose riches, power and worldliness he denounced. His followers, most of them from poor backgrounds, were called Lollards - literally, in Middle English, ‘mumblers’, a reference to their constant mouthing of their own private prayers to God.
