In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  As the earl of Pembroke prepared to leave anew for the continental wars in 1372, he had a bitter falling out with Lord Grey. While the earl had previously been fighting in France, Grey dispensed a rumor that the earl had died abroad and proceeded to invade some of the earl’s lands. When the earl returned he made Grey apologize publicly in front of several great lords but retained his pique against Grey.

  Pembroke regarded Grey as a nouveau riche arriviste, and Grey was indeed descended from a younger son of a minor baronial family. The other cousin—and next in line as the earl’s heir—was William of Beauchamp, descended directly from one of England’s ancient families.

  Before the earl again departed for the French wars in 1372, he placed his lands in irrevocable trust. This provided that in event of his death abroad the trustees were to grant the whole estate to William of Beauchamp, provided that the king would make Beauchamp earl of Pembroke. In effect John Hastings was adopting William of Beauchamp as his son and heir, with the king’s anticipated approval and cutting out entirely Lord Grey. This was a clever but dicey legal maneuver, just the kind of complicated instrument a common lawyer loved to draw up.

  The whole plan fell apart when John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, heard while he was in captivity in Spain that his young second wife was pregnant and then that she had borne him a son, John II. Pembroke had no doubt that he was the genetic father of the child. The trust that the earl had set up giving everything to William of Beauchamp had not provided for this possibility. In effect John Hastings had disinherited his own yet-to-be-born son by a rash and sloppy legal maneuver. “Everything that was done has gone wrong,” he lamented.

  John Hastings promised a monstrous ransom to his Spanish captors (equivalent to thirty million dollars) and hurried back to England to try to straighten out this mess. Between Paris and Calais in 1375 he took ill and died of the plague.

  While Lord Grey was exulting that the trust meant to exclude him would have to be canceled—itself a very difficult legal engagement—the possible new heir, John II, made things easier for Grey by dying accidentally in a tournament. After protracted litigation that went on for two decades, Grey and Beauchamp settled the inheritance between them. Grey assumed the inheritance but by collusive prearrangement sold off a substantial part of it to Beauchamp at bargain rates.

  The fears of John Hastings I, earl of Pembroke, of what would happen to his great estate and family name if it fell into the hands of parvenus had come strikingly to pass, partly because of the plague and partly because of his rash reliance on an expensive but incompetent lawyer who drew up a flawed trust.

  At this point Edward Hastings of Elsing, descended from Sir Hugh, the knight portrayed in the magnificent brass of 1347, belatedly put in a claim. He went so far as to challenge Lord Grey to the archaic process (not finally abolished until 1819) of trial by battle: “Thou lying false knight, I am ready to prove with my body against thy body,” Edward Hastings proclaimed. Grey wisely declined the duel.

  Edward Hastings’s legal claim was very weak. The courts turned him down and ordered him to pay the enormous court costs of 987 pounds (two hundred thousand dollars). Though he could afford to pay he refused on the principle that he was the true earl of Pembroke.

  For this ridiculous pride, Edward Hastings was consigned to debtor’s prison and languished there for twenty years, complaining of the inhumanity that left him there “bound in fetters of iron more like a thief or traitor than a gentleman of birth.” Not to say earl of Pembroke. After his wife died, he softened at last and made his peace with the now billionaire aristocrat Lord Grey, marrying his son to one of Grey’s daughters. Edward Hastings died shortly thereafter. The Grey family played an important role in early-sixteenth-century politics.

  Edward Hastings was undoubtedly a litigious crank, but there are some aspects of his irrationality that point up the subtle difference between the pre– and post–Black Death gentry worlds.

  The plague had shaken the gentry society like an earthquake, and the fissures ran deep and long. It would be wrong to view the pre–Black Death era as a golden age of chivalry and consistently elegant behavior. But after the plague a certain restraining sense of honor and civility among the gentry and nobility was attenuated.

  A seemingly endless war and the bitter politics of the reign of Richard II in the last two decades of the century certainly contributed to violence and rapacity among England’s landed elite. The takeover of the crown by Henry IV of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s son, from the Black Prince’s son, the gay and erratic Richard II, in 1399, Richard’s condemnation as a tyrant by Parliament, and the murder of the deposed monarch, probably by starvation, were the ultimate symbolic acts of this new dark age of bad behavior.

  The havoc randomly visited upon rising gentry families by the plague certainly contributed to the advent of an era of rural capitalism, unceasing aggressive litigation, and the conviction that unrestrained greed is good. American law students in their first-year course on property law are today imbibing a judicial heritage crystallized in Black Death England and the culture of contention and merciless conflict it embedded in the common law.

  The social and cultural equation works in the opposite direction. If the judicial heritage of Black Death England embedded contention and merciless conflict in the common law and legal profession, the formality of the law itself and its slow-moving judicial procedures imposed restraint on the behavior of the gentry.

  It is not that some wealthy gentry did not resort, like the great nobility, to gangsterism and violence. They did occasionally. But this was always measured against the due process of the common law and widely regarded among the upper middle class as bad behavior.

  Under a renewed strong monarchy in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries the peaceful resolution of conflict and the juristic socializing of ambitions mitigated the violence and privatism and brought the gentry back to a rule- and process-driven life. It was not a generous or charitable culture that was transmitted into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it was one that operated within the rule of law. Within the juristic culture even dowagers had their share of triumphs.

  At first glance it seems that the gentry world in the age of the Black Death treated women of this class harshly—as property. But closer consideration moderates this easy judgment. Not only were widows privileged by the law of the dower, but brides bringing substantial landed wealth to their marriages were protected from abuse and impoverishment by prenuptial agreements giving them a joint ownership in the real estate that was the main part of their dowries, defending such wives from abusive treatment and curt dismissal.

  Furthermore, even saying that married women in gentry society were mere property in the time of the Pestilence does not get at the reality of their situation. As in rich families today, the words mere and property did not go well together. There was nothing dismissive or pejorative about property. It was the heart and soul of gentry life. The males of the gentry household knew full well that their well-being and status followed closely from the level of property they held, particularly in landed estates. To be equated with property was no insult in the gentry world.

  Nor did this mean that marriages were necessarily without love and passion, even if their transactional business character ultimately prevailed. The young people of this affluent class were well-conditioned in the psychology and ritual of romantic love. They were immersed in this culture, in the romances that they read or that were recited to them after dinner in the great halls of the stone family houses. They were prone and ready to take sexual initiative at any time after they reached puberty. Gentry women as yet did not wear underwear. Men wore a doublet with a movable codpiece covering their sexual organ. Coupling was quick and easy and the steady increase in the number of private bedrooms in the gentry houses—an amenity in the twelfth century reserved only for the head of household and his lady—facilitated sexual unions with due regard for female modesty, which wasn’t very much to start w
ith.

  The one great lack in the lives of gentry women was their exclusion from higher education and the learned professions. It didn’t inevitably have to be that way, but this sharp exclusion crystallized as the universities and secular professions, particularly law, were constituted in the period 1200 to 1350. This sexual segregation in higher education and the professions was not breached in England until around 1900, and not in substantial degree until around 1965.

  In recent years there has been a tendency to lay the blame for medieval exclusion of women from higher education and the secular professions at the feet of church tradition and hierarchy. The church fathers St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, around 400, were outspoken misogynists, greatly respecting nuns for their spiritual qualities, but insisting that they be excluded from all leadership and sacerdotal roles in the church, and thus from the education needed to gain these posts.

  Some historians have seen the triumphs of Ambrose’s and Augustine’s misogyny as the final chapter in a bitter conflict over the role of women in the church that goes back to the first century A.D. The attitude of the church fathers, further institutionalized by an exclusively male priesthood, can be regarded as the imposition of a male chauvinist position from which twelfth- and thirteenth-century ecclesiastical culture could not depart. Yet the church and medieval society changed in many directions over the centuries and their exclusionary attitude to women could have changed also. From the twelfth century on, many separated (“heretical”) medieval religious communities, including the fourteenth-century English Lollards, allowed women preaching and leadership roles.

  There was also a generation or so between about 1120 and 1160 when the church did produce top, highly educated intellectuals such as Heloise in Paris and Hildegard of Bingen in the Rhine valley, as well as a strong visible female hand in patronage of the arts and letters.

  By 1250 the prospect for this road not taken was wiped away. The main reason was the inconvenience, instability, and costs that education and entrance into the professions would have meant for upper-middle-class gentry families. The English gentry families of the fourteenth century experienced no democratic ideological pressure toward enhanced privileges for their daughters. On the contrary, the weight of church tradition was strongly in favor of excluding women from higher education and the professions, and the gentry fathers and brothers had no hesitancy in cultivating these male chauvinist traditions.

  There were frustrated intelligent and ambitious women among the gentry class of the late Middle Ages, of that we can be sure, who did not like early marriage and motherhood or the nun’s veil and cloistered chastity as the only viable alternatives in their lives. Yet the great majority of gentry women of propertied families who followed the conventional role (and were still following it in the era of Jane Austen or even George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf) still led comfortable and dignified lives, as much as women of the suburban middle class in America today.

  The women to be pitied, if any, among the gentry class in the age of the Black Death were not married or widowed ones. The pitiable gentry women in the fourteenth century were daughters who for one reason or another—too ugly, too pious, and most commonly, lacking adequate dowries because the family already had too many other daughters, despite the widespread practice of female infanticide—found no husband and were shunted off to nunneries by the age of twenty. Some convents were still as most had been in the twelfth century—rich and genteel. The food in these high-toned establishments, nearly always of the Benedictine Order, was good. Diversion was gained by choral praying, writing, painting, embroidering, and (in spite of the indignant complaints of bishops) breeding and raising birds and greyhounds. When you win big at the greyhound track today, give silent thanks to those medieval dog-loving nuns.

  In England of 1340, however, as was amply demonstrated as long ago as 1924 by the great medievalist Eileen Power, there were many dozens of small nunneries that were underfunded (funded by a rich family in the past and then forgotten about), even impoverished (sometimes by mismanagement), and sadly deficient in good food, entertainment, and amenities. This bleak ambience was unrelieved, in spite of the jokes and anecdotes about straying and licentious nuns—the medieval equivalent of Playboy magazine—by the sexual activity that married women and many a rich dowager enjoyed. They had to make do with piety alone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Jewish Conspiracy

  ON OCTOBER 30, 1348, AT Chatel near Geneva, then part of the County of Savoy, a certain Jew named Agimet, after twice being “put to torture a little,” as was allowed in continental Roman-based law, made the following confession in a formal judicial proceeding before a panel of judges (translated by I. R. Marcus):

  “To begin with it is clear that at the Lent just passed Pultus Clesis de Ranz [a Jewish merchant] had sent this very Jew, Agimet, to Venice to buy silks and other things for him. When this came to the notice of Rabbi Peyret, a Jew of Chambery who was a teacher of their law, he sent for this Agimet, for whom he had searched, and when he had come before him he said: ‘We have been informed that you are going to Venice to buy silk and other wares. Here I am giving you a little package of half a span in size which contains some prepared poison and venom in a thin, sewed leather-bag. Distribute it among the wells, cisterns and springs about Venice and the other places to which you go, in order to poison the people who use the water of the aforesaid wells and will have been poisoned by you, namely, the wells in which the poison will have been placed.’

  “Agimet took this package full of poison and carried it with him to Venice, and when he came there he threw and scattered a portion of it into the well or cistern of fresh water which was there near the German House, in order to poison the people who used the water of that cistern. And he says that this is the only cistern of sweet water in the city. He also says that the afore-mentioned Rabbi Peyret promised to give him whatever he wanted for his troubles in this business. Of his own accord Agimet confessed further that after this had been done he left at once in order that he should not be captured by the citizens or others, and that he went personally to Calabria and Apulia and threw the above mentioned poison into many wells. He confesses also that he put some of this same poison in the wells of the streets of Ballet.

  “He confesses further that he put some of this poison into the public fountain of the city of Toulouse and in the wells that are near the [Mediterranean] sea. Asked if at the time that he scattered the venom and poisoned the wells, above mentioned, any people had died, he said that he did not know inasmuch as he had left everyone of the above mentioned places in a hurry. Asked if any of the Jews of those places were guilty in the above mentioned matter, he answered that he did not know.”

  This detailed legal document (Agimet swore on the Torah as to the truth of his confession) is accompanied by many other references to Jews under torture confessing to have spread the plague by poisoning wells, as in the following account from the Chronicle of Strasbourg in Alsace, a mainly German city that belonged to the French kingdom. It was also the only French province where Jews could still reside legally, having been expelled from the rest of France in 1306.

  “In the matter of this plague the Jews throughout the world were reviled and accused in all lands of having caused it through the poison which they are said to have put into the water and the wells—that is what they were accused of—and for this reason the Jews were burnt all the way from the Mediterranean into Germany, but not in Avignon, for the pope protected them there.

  “Nevertheless they tortured a number of Jews in Berne and Zonfingen [Switzerland] who then admitted that they had put poison into many wells, and they also found the poison in the wells. Thereupon they burnt the Jews in many towns and wrote of this affair to Strasbourg, Freiburg, and Basel in order that they too should burn their Jews. But the leaders in these three cities in whose hands the government lay did not believe that ‘anything ought to be done to the Jews.’

  “However in Basel the citizens march
ed to the city-hall and compelled the council to take an oath that they would burn the Jews, and that they would allow no Jews to enter the city for the next two hundred years. Thereupon the Jews were arrested in all these places and a conference was arranged to meet at Benfeld [Alsace, February 8, 1349]. The Bishop of Strasbourg [Berthold II], all the feudal lords of Alsace, and representatives of the three above mentioned cities came there. The deputies of the city of Strasbourg were asked what they were going to do with their Jews. They answered and said that they knew no evil of them. Then they asked the Strasbourgers why they had closed the wells and put away the buckets, and there was a great indignation and clamor against the deputies from Strasbourg. So finally the bishop and the lords and the Imperial Cities agreed to do away with the Jews. The result was that they were burnt in many cities, and wherever they were expelled they were caught by the peasants and stabbed to death or drowned.”

  The town council of Strasbourg that wanted to save the Jews was deposed on February 9–10, and the new council gave in to the mob, who then arrested the Jews on Friday, the 13th.

  The belief that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death first took root in southern France and neighboring Spain. In the fourteenth century there were only 2.5 million Jews in all of Europe, but a third of these lived in Spain and on the other side of the Pyrenees in southern France. The Jewish communities in this region were of long standing, in some parts of Spain going back to Roman times. They were relatively affluent, extremely literate, and in a relationship of growing tension with their Christian neighbors for both religious and economic reasons.