The Black Death in London (7 page)

By 21 September, further restrictions were imposed at Tournai, limiting the number of mourners to two per funeral.
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Why London did not impose such constraints is not easy to establish, although it may relate to the more communal nature of civic government at this time. There is a level of archaeological evidence that wooden coffins were used more frequently for the burial of plague dead, suggesting that some guiding strategy may have been implemented (see
Chapter 3
).

Just one document hints at a public information system during plague outbreaks. A medieval parchment, found tucked into the wall of a rectory in Sherborne in the middle of the nineteenth century, provides a glimpse of the advice Londoners were given during the plague, communicated through a proclamation at the churchyard preaching cross at St Paul’s Cathedral:

Be it known to all Christian men and women that our Holy Father the Pope has true knowledge by revelation what medicine is for the sickness that reigneth now among the people. In any wise, when that you hear of this bull, first say in the worship of God, of Our Lady, and St Martin iii paternosters, iii aves, and i credo, and the morrow after immediately hear you the mass of St Martin and the mass while say ye the psalter of Our Lady and give one offering to St Martin, whatever that ye will, and promise to fast once a year in bread and water while you live, or else get another to do it for you. And he that believeth not of this stands in the sentence of Holy Church for it hath been preached at Paul’s Cross.
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December 1348

The plague’s impact on the city in December 1348 is quite clear from the twenty-seven Husting wills prepared during this one month (four written on a single day alone – 13 December). This represents a dramatic increase, nearly three times the rate of November and equivalent to an average year’s total. This steep rise in mortality is also reflected in the one court roll for the year that we have from the suburbs – in this case the Bishop of London’s manor at Stepney. In December 1348 four members of one family (mother, daughter and two sons) had died, and at the court held there on 20 January 1349, nine entire tenements were reported vacant and in the lord’s hands owing to the death of the tenants.
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To the south of the city, sudden clerical vacancies were filled by Bishop Edington at the churches of St Mary Magdalen, Southwark and Wandsworth in January, and in February at Clapham, Camberwell and St George the Martyr, Southwark, all less than 5 miles from Westminster. The Wandsworth institution recognised that, ‘with the present increasing mortality, the bishop must provide for the needs of his flock’.
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The deaths leaving these vacancies probably occurred in December and January, a conclusion strengthened by evidence from the court rolls for the manor of Vauxhall, a little more than half a mile from Lambeth Palace and probably held by Edward the Black Prince. The roll for the court held on 31 December 1348 recorded four deaths of customary tenants.
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Preferred burial locations and details of bequests set out in the wills indicate that the will-makers came from all different areas of the city, and from a wide range of professions. For example, Henry Iddesworth, canon of St Paul’s and Archdeacon of Middlesex, made arrangements to leave his house in Wood Street and shops in the parish of St John Zachary towards the founding of a perpetual chantry in St Paul’s Cathedral. Edmund de Hemenhale, a former sheriff of London and wealthy mercer, arranged for two executors to receive his estate in the ‘great seld’, or market, of Cheapside during the minority of John and Thomas, his sons, with a house in Lothbury set aside for John.
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Edmund’s family was still young: Thomas was 5 years old at this time, and a daughter, Margaret, was just 1.
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Edmund was probably buried in St Martin-le-Grand, since his wife established there a chantry to them both when she died in 1361.

Geoffrey Penthogg, a waterbearer, willed on 30 December to be buried in the church of St Botolph Aldgate. He left his wife Johanna a messuage and a garden in the Portsoken ward, and his son John a garden in East Smithfield. He was dead within ten days, as Johanna’s will, written on 9 January 1349, requested burial near her husband. Against this backdrop, and despite the (time-limited) blanket indulgence issued in November, some citizens continued to apply for papal permission to choose their confessors. Adam Pikeman and his wife Constance received permission in December, and Alexander de Bacland and his wife in January.

The wealthier were able to plan, afford and implement such arrangements for their goods and properties. They were able to choose the location of their graves, with at least some chance of getting their wishes even during the plague. This, however, did not apply to the vast majority of London’s population. Being poor, they might normally expect a modest plot in one of the many small external cemeteries attached to parish churches in the city. But with mortality spiralling, it became clear to Ralph Stratford, the Bishop of London, that these, fairly numerous though they were, might not suffice for the disaster. Whether the concept of emergency cemeteries was due to have been discussed at the Parliament planned in November is unknown, but it is certain that between the outbreak of the plague in London and the end of December, Stratford had arranged for a new cemetery to be established on the city outskirts.

The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker described how the bishop bought the croft called by Londoners ‘Nomanneslond’. This field lay south of another field called Whitewellbeck in the late thirteenth century, between modern St John Street and Goswell Road, and was apparently the site of executions from at least the early fourteenth century.
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It measured some 3 acres, according to the sixteenth-century historian John Stow, and acquired the name of Pardon churchyard. It was apparently walled round and provided with a chapel.
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This chapel is shown in remarkable detail on a sixteenth-century map of the water supply of the London Charterhouse; a three-bay, externally buttressed building with windows in each bay and a gabled roof surmounted by a small, steepled lantern or bellcote (see Fig. 2). By the early fifteenth century, the close had earned the name of ‘Deademannescroft’.
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This burial ground is known to lie between what is now Great Sutton Street on the north, and Clerkenwell Road on the south (see also Fig. 3 on p. 48).
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The principal route out of the city to this new cemetery was through Aldersgate, up past St Bartholomew’s priory and along what is now Goswell Road. The dead could also have been taken via Newgate and Smithfield, and thence up St John Street. It is not clear when the cemetery first began to take burials, but an argument can be made that, despite its considerable extent, it was approaching capacity in the early weeks of 1349. The carts removing the dead from the city must have been numerous indeed. As we shall see, a later emergency cemetery of comparable size at East Smithfield was able easily to contain 2,400 burials, a figure which could have been achieved by a rate of some forty burials each day in November and December. Such a rate accords well with the situation described at the beginning of the plague by Robert of Avesbury, who noted that ‘on the same day, 20, 40 or 60 bodies, and on many occasions many more, might be committed for burial together in the same pit’.
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The figure also corresponds with the (later) events described in Tournai when the plague hit that city in 1349. There, ‘every day the dead were carried into churches, now five, now ten, now fifteen. And in the church of St Brice, sometimes 20 or 30.’
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Placing such figures in context, if London did have 60,000 souls within its walls, in an untroubled year we might expect six burials or less per day across the entire city.
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This, however, was just the beginning: things were going to get much, much worse.

The king and his treasurer, Bishop William Edington, both remained in London for much of December. They were in the royal chamber in the Tower of London on 14 December, when the ‘infirm and paralysed’ John Offord, Archbishop-elect of Canterbury, took the oath of fealty for the temporalities of the Archbishopric,
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and the king was in Westminster from before 28 December through to January. They were therefore very well placed to witness the unfolding catastrophe. On 1 January 1349 Edward was compelled to write to Edington, cancelling the planned Parliament formally. The letter addressed a ‘certain parliament of ours concerning great and weighty matters … and the state of our realm, at Westminster on Monday after St Hilary [19 January]’, to which it was intended that the bishop would appear in person with the other prelates and magnates. It explained:

since a sudden and deadly plague has arisen there and round about, and has so grown in strength that men are fearful to go there safely during this time, we have, for these and other obvious reasons, ordered that the said parliament be prorogued [until 27th April 1349], and for this reason, you should not come there on the Monday.

The letter reiterated instruction that when Parliament did reconvene, the prior of Winchester and the archdeacon were to attend in person, the chapter to send one procurator and the diocesan clergy to send two, and that no excuses would be allowed.
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The king then left for the Augustinian priory of Merton, 8 miles south-west of the city, to celebrate the Epiphany on 6 January for jousting and games, some of which may have involved a funereal aspect.
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It may have been at around this time that accusations of poisoning the water supply of the city were made. Fear of well-poisoning by ‘foreigners’ and Jews had already gripped European cities and contributed to the dreadful massacres of Jews. England, of course, had no permanent Jewish communities at this time, but it seems probable that other scapegoats were targeted. The Conduit, the principal piped water supply situated in Cheapside, was under the administration of two masters, at this time Robert Fundour and William de St Albans. They raised money from the lease of tankards for collecting the water, and from certain local properties whose rent contributed to the upkeep of leaden pipes extending as far as Westminster and to the conduit house itself. Their accounts, covering a two-year period from November 1348, show that at one specific time, the hefty sum of 32
s
2d
was spent ‘examining the Conduit when it was slandered for poison, by command of the Mayor’.
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Clearly the supply was found to be clean, and in any event, it would soon become abundantly obvious that the water from the west of the city was not carrying this particular scourge.

The Depths of Despair, January 1349

And there was in those days death without sorrow, marriage without affection, self-imposed penance, want without poverty, and flight without escape.
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These words were written by John of Reading, the Westminster monk who witnessed the calamity first-hand, and their brevity exposes the helplessness and horror in the face of the catastrophe far better than could any extended description. The sheer scale of the disaster, becoming clear now to king and commoner alike, must truly have felt like the end of the world. The number of Husting wills, both drawn up and enrolled in January and February, leave no doubt on this. Thirty-eight new wills were compiled in January and a further fifty in February, a monthly rate eighteen times greater than that prior to the outbreak; and four more citizens received personal papal permission to choose confessors,
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as the wealthier now scrambled to secure and safeguard their inheritances, estates and souls.

One striking aspect of these will-makers is their favouring of the church or churchyard of St Giles Cripplegate as a place of burial at this time. St Giles was the single most popular location within the list of Husting wills written between October 1348 and the end of 1350, with no fewer than thirteen wills specifying burial there (four more even than at St Paul’s Cathedral, the next most popular place).
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All were drawn up between the end of November 1348 and the first week of April 1349, eight being written in the days between 8 January and 8 February 1349; and while this reflects to some degree the cluster of will-making in general in the first three months of the year, the concentration remains very significant. This was not a trade gild concentration, and neither were all the testators parishioners – they came from all across the city. St Giles’ power as the patron saint of lepers, beggars, cripples, and of those struck by sudden misery, was surely what drew so many frightened citizens to request their final resting places there. The church clearly had a special recognition in the minds of the beseiged citizens.