In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  Thirteenth-century English society learned how interconnected were freedom and capitalism, what a Cambridge anthropologist has perhaps over-enthusiastically called “the origin of English individualism.”

  The royal justices as they went on circuits to each county town twice a year “holding the assizes” (as is still done in the outback of western Canada) abetted the process of eliminating serfdom and giving a legal status of freedom to the manorial peasants.

  The trend was also in accordance with the policies of the crown. The Plantagenet monarchy was ever searching for ways to improve its tax base. Serfs did not pay taxes directly to the crown; you had to be a freeman to pay rural taxes. The manorial lord was supposed to collect taxes from his serfs when a general tax levy was imposed and then turn this money (along with the lord’s own tax payment) over to the crown.

  But the lord would try to cheat and pocket at least some of the taxes he had collected from his serfs and not turn it over to the royal tax collectors. It was therefore to the fiscal advantage of the crown to multiply peasant freedom, thereby bringing the peasant family directly under the king’s tax levies.

  The royal justices after 1180 found a convenient loophole in the law, which stated that only a freeman could be a litigant in a civil property action in the royal courts. The judges proceeded to allow just about any peasant who wanted to do so (and pay court costs) to appear before them in their county circuit court without inquiring into the litigants’ free or servile status.

  Thereby the royal justices automatically granted free status to any peasant who was a plaintiff or defendant in a lawsuit in the county court. This happened on a large scale in the century after 1180. It also by itself dribbled more money into the Plantagenet treasury, because litigants had to pay court costs to have their cases decided in the county courts before the royal justices and the loser even in a civil (noncriminal) action had to pay a small fine to the crown.

  By 1280 at least half the peasants in the agricultural heartland of south central England had gained their legal freedom, sometimes by obtaining their manumission from lords, but also by arbitrary action of the royal justices.

  In the next hundred years the proportion of peasants still in the serf category shrank with each passing decade. Serfdom and capital land market are an awkward fit: The former is an effect of a status society, the latter of a money economy. The official opening up of the land market in the 1290s by parliamentary legislation accelerated the eventual disappearance of serfdom, developed for a very different society.

  In the years that followed, the status of the rural peasantry was a hodgepodge of conflicting judicial mechanisms characteristic of a rural society in transition to a modern real estate market. There were some affluent serfs and plenty of impoverished free peasantry. Yet some of the free peasantry had gotten into the booming land market, had bought up their less enterprising neighbors’ lands or purchased more land from a cash-starved landlord (whose attorney had circumvented an entail) and were in transition to yeoman status and ultimately, by 1500, entry into the lower ranks of the gentry landlords.

  Climatic cycling continued to drive social and economic change. Around 1280 the warming trend began to run down. A new weather cycle unevenly but visibly intruded into rural England. Summers became cooler and shorter, the long autumns ideal for bringing in the lush crops truncated. Winters became longer and more harsh. The cooler period was to last until the late fifteenth century, when it would be followed by another warm century and then the “little ice age” of the seventeenth century, when people actually skated on the frozen Thames—not something you would want to try today.

  In the summers of 1316 and 1317 rural disaster struck. The sun did not shine. There were widespread crop failures. There was famine and death from hunger. These terrible years had a special cause. Huge volcanic eruptions in Indonesia threw continent-sized clouds of ashes into the atmosphere and by 1316 this cloud of unbeing had reached England. Even when the sun shone again and the famine subsided, there were adverse weather conditions—too much rain—for good cereal harvests. The price of grain escalated. The stomachs of the peasants were no longer full.

  Even aristocratic temperament became meaner and angrier. In 1327 a palace coup engineered by Edward II’s French queen, Isabella, and her aristocratic lover, with acquiescence on the part of the short-tempered and unhappy nobility, resulted in the king’s forced abdication in favor of his very young son Edward III.

  The dispossessed King Edward II was killed by a red-hot iron poker shoved up his anus. This savagery partly reflected hostility on the part of the Church and other opinion-makers to the king’s homosexuality and his favoritism toward his young French male lover, but it also reflected the general malaise, anger, and pessimism of the new age of global cooling.

  It may be speculated that the Great Famine and global cooling of the early fourteenth century and the deterioration in the diet of the common people that resulted had some adverse impact on public health. Undernourished bodies were more easily prey to the Black Death. Did a decrease in the standard of living in northern Europe, including England, open the way for a pandemic of infectious disease? The current state of biomedical history does not allow more than speculation on this matter.

  A third of the best arable land in England in 1346 was owned by church officials—bishops and abbots—or by ecclesiastical corporations, the chapters of cathedral priests, called canons, or by monastic communities. Often—although not without noisy litigation—the bishop or abbot directly administered these corporately owned lands as well as the estates directly conjoined to his office.

  Most of this land had been granted to the church officials and corporations by lay nobility and gentry in the period between 1000 and 1200 when land was still cheap in England. These grants, set down in elaborate formal land deeds called charters (literally “documents”), were not mere acts of charity like a billionaire endowing a university laboratory or dormitory today. The grant to the church meant a specific spiritual service of great value in the afterlife.

  The bishops, abbots, and cathedral canons or monks promised to pray perpetually and even daily for the soul of their benefactor and designated members of his family until the end of time, speeding them through the transitional state of Purgatory where those souls were doing time in recompense for earthly sins, until they were washed clean and ascended to heaven. (Almost no one in the optimistic Middle Ages was consigned to hell in the afterlife, no matter how many or heinous their crimes, except for heretics, witches, and Jews.)

  Some of these lands granted by charter to church officials and corporations were already well-developed, heavily populated estates, which heirs would agonize over losing. As the old lord lay on his deathbed no one minded visits by his mistresses and whores. It was the whispered conferences with a priest that concerned heirs, because this could lead to a deathbed alienation of a share of the about-to-be-inherited patrimony. The courts informally decided that no lord should alienate to the church more than 10 percent of his entailed estates. But this was more than enough to enrich ecclesiastics.

  With the population boom and real estate frenzy of the thirteenth century, the value of these landed gifts, their charters enforced by the royal courts as well as by ecclesiastical curses against infringement, immensely increased in value. Real estate development and inflation was as well known a phenomenon in the Middle Ages as the miracles of the Virgin Mary. What in 1000 could have been marginal, thinly populated land or vacant scrub land or forest was by 1280 thickly settled prime arable estate or in the north richly green cattle and sheep ranches.

  Bishops had for a thousand years been men of business, public officials, usually of noble family, experienced in managing income and skillful at getting ever more of it. How else were the great Gothic-style cathedrals of the thirteenth century in episcopal cities paid for? But abbots in the mists of earlier times had been elected from among their communities for their promise as spiritual leaders or even fame as clergy
men and scholars.

  By the late twelfth century in England this kind of monk was rarely chosen as abbot. The typical abbot had entered the monastery at any time between age six (as an “oblate” given up to God by his family) and twenty. He filled a succession of administrative offices within the billion-dollar corporation that a large and well-endowed monastery represented.

  When an abbot died, the monks gathered in their chapel, prayed for divine enlightenment, and chose from among the community an experienced administrator who had already proven his mettle in property management, accounting, and the perpetual land litigation that a great monastery was involved in. If the king approved of the abbot chosen by the monastic community—and normally he did, since the nominated abbot was a man of the world the crown could do business with, a person of conservative temperament and realistic attitude—the abbot-elect entered into the office for life.

  By monastic rules drawn up around A.D. 550, the abbot had complete authority over both the spiritual and physical sides of monastic life, over the bodies and souls of the monastic brethren. Now he no longer dined with the monastic community at its two meals a day, one around 11:00 A.M. and the other at 5:00 P.M. Only rarely and then on festive and ceremonial occasions did he dine with the brothers. He inhabited a house separate from the monks’ dormitories and workhouses. He entertained princes, lords, and gentry in his private dining room and put them up overnight in well-appointed bedrooms.

  The abbot surrounded himself with a couple of secretaries and a dozen administrative officials, drawn normally from the monastic brethren. He hardly ever made a pilgrimage to a religious shrine, but he was frequently in the saddle accompanied by a bodyguard inspecting work on far-flung estates of the abbey. He retained a secular lawyer, frequently conferred with him, and appeared frequently in the county court or even one of the central courts of London to give testimony in major lawsuits affecting the abbey’s property. He engaged in year-long wrangles with the king’s treasury officials over minutiae in the abbey’s tax returns.

  The abbot was forever on the lookout for expanding the monastery’s landholdings, either through major gifts from laymen (not so easy now to come by as in the good old days of cheap land and before heirs had learned to hire their own watchdog attorneys) or purchase.

  We must think of the fourteenth-century abbot as something like the president of a leading American university today. The latter usually has an academic background but he is not selected for those skills. He became a corporate chief executive officer, a man of business, a bigtime capitalist manager. So it was with a late medieval abbot. Such an official had to be forever attentive to changes in the social environment that could affect the abbey’s wealth and social status—the ambitions and imbecilities of kings, dramatic changes in climate, and the impact of pandemics on the peasant workforce. These vicissitudes were central to the abbot’s career.

  Although he had absolute rule over his community for life, the abbot had to keep the monks happy, which meant prosperous, secure, and above all, well-fed. The kitchen records of Westminster Abbey in London from the mid–fifteenth century have been discovered and analyzed by Barbara Harvey in Living and Dying in the Middle Ages (1993), a sensational book that caused a lot of embarrassment to pious medievalists.

  The results show that each of the sixty monks consumed two pounds of red meat a day, plus countless morsels of fowl and fish, washed down with claret wine or fresh ale in unlimited quantities, buttressed by an array of sugary desserts. Not all of the thousand abbeys in England could afford this lifestyle, but probably half could and assiduously cultivated it.

  Records of fourteenth-century gentry households indicate that the food consumption per capita in secular upper-middle-class landed families was about the same as in monastic communities. But weren’t the monks supposed to be ascetics? Some people thought so, especially wise-guy poets like Geoffrey Chaucer. But in fact what made you a monk (or nun) was living a regular, disciplined life in a cloistered community, not abstaining from a heavy gentry diet. The abbot, whatever else he did, had to make sure that this high calorie consumption was not diminished. That alone was a challenge to the abbatial executives.

  But force-feeding the fat monks was relatively trivial compared to the problems raised by the unprecedented mortality of the Black Death in the late 1340s. The sudden striking down of perhaps a quarter of the monastic community meant an unusual number of vacancies among the brethren to be judiciously filled. More important, 40 percent of the labor supply in the manorial villages on the great estates owned by a large monastery disappeared.

  Having gotten rid of the plague-infested bodies, usually in mass graves with victims stacked like cordwood (or as a contemporary Italian writer remarked, like lasagna), five cadavers deep, the abbot had to sort out a bewildering array of problems arising from the vacant tenements and the threat of a sudden shift from a glut to a dearth of agricultural wage laborers.

  Close study by economic historians has revealed that the ecclesiastical executives as a whole did better than might be expected—for a while. The most severe impact of the population collapse was postponed in many places for a generation until the 1370s, because in 1350 there were still so many landless peasants ready to take over vacant rent-paying farms. Yet for an abbey that already was mismanaged and heavily indebted, the Black Death represented a crisis that imposed an additional burden on the corporation’s bottom line and high anxiety for executive abbots. These were businessmen under pressure.

  On the estates of the abbot of Halesowen in Worcestershire in the rich farmland of central England, the impact on and the response to the pandemic by a very rich abbot and hundreds of peasants who worked for him and paid rent to him can be scrutinized, thanks to Zvi Razi’s research. It is the kind of business case study favored today by American business schools.

  Faced with an unprecedented physical disaster that threatens the fiscal viability of the corporation and its way of doing business, how does a skillful executive officer respond? And—less interesting to the business schools—how are the lives of the corporation’s workers affected? Halesowen gives us medieval answers.

  The great manorial estate of Halesowen with its thousands of peasant families obligated to the abbot in one way or another was located in what is today the suburbs of the modern metropolis of Birmingham. This industrial city did not exist in the fourteenth century except as a small village. The big city for Halesowen was the cathedral center of Worcester, where the judgments and opinions of bishops were meaningful although not necessarily authoritative (such were the complexities of the church’s canon law) for the abbot executive of Halesowen.

  The abbot of Halesowen when the plague struck in 1349 was Thomas of Birmingham, a member of an old country family after whom the modern city is named. Thomas of Birmingham had been abbot since 1331. He survived the plague and remained abbot until he died of natural causes in 1369. Given the short life span of fourteenth-century men—although the well-fed monks shielded from violence usually outlived the forty-year life expectancy for laymen—Thomas’s long tenure as abbot was unusual. Imagine someone today as chief executive officer of a midsize corporation for thirty-eight years—uncommon. Thomas of Birmingham’s successor, William Bromsgrove, survived old Thomas very briefly, being cut down in a recurrence of the Black Death in 1369. Another election had to be held, making two in one year, an unsettling phenomenon for the monks.

  None of these abbots took much part in politics or local society beyond the abbey. They were totally absorbed in the religious and especially economic life of the monastery. The Birminghams had stayed out of politics but William, Abbot Thomas’s father, was a member of the entourage of a high-level gentry person, John of Sutton, who hazardously dabbled in national politics in the late 1320s. When John of Sutton got in trouble with some royal court politics, William of Birmingham acted as guardian of the Sutton estates to keep away marauders and enemies.

  Before the plague decimated the peasant population on H
alesowen’s lands, Abbot Thomas had faced some stiff challenges that threatened the abbey’s income. On the positive side he had been able to obtain three modest grants of land from local gentry. The largest of these came from an heiress on the conventional condition that candles be lit in the monastic chapel to accompany the prayers sung on behalf of her soul. The abbey was also to distribute twenty shillings (about one thousand dollars) annually to the poor in her memory.

  Abbot Thomas successfully negotiated with the royal government and the bishop of Worcester to be allowed to appropriate these gifted lands into Halesowen’s core estates.

  But in his petition to the bishop, Abbot Thomas referred to recent events that had harmed the abbey’s income. A serious fire had destroyed houses and shops in the town of Halesowen itself. This hurt because a substantial part of the abbey’s income came from commercial activity—taxing the borough merchants and conducting a weekly market in the village square and a four-day fair twice a year. Each fair was conducted to commemorate one of the two saints to whom the abbey was dedicated, St. Barbara and St. Kelem.

  Kelem was a real person, an eight-year-old Anglo-Saxon prince, murdered by his greedy sister and her lover in the eighth century. St. Barbara was an entirely mythical saint of Middle Eastern provenance supposedly martyred by a Roman emperor in A.D. 303. She was thought to offer protection from sudden death, usually as a result of lightning or cannonballs.

  Abbot Thomas complained to the bishop of Worcester that St. Barbara had lost her drawing power and this affected attraction of gift-bearing pilgrims and business at the fair dedicated to her. Possibly the “coldness” to St. Barbara that Thomas said had developed among the populace was due to her failure to help in the great famine in the second decade of the century, which was followed by bad weather and an outbreak of murrain. She certainly did not help in the Black Death.