The Black Death in London (9 page)

The property market remained active, doubtless buoyed up to some degree by the implementation by executors of enrolled wills or the reorganisation of rental arrangements within families. For example, the cartulary of St John Clerkenwell, the Hospitaller priory adjacent to the Pardon cemetery, recorded among land transactions between its tenants an instance of property-swapping between relatives. A charter dated 19 February 1349 records a grant by Peter atte Gate to his relative, Robert atte Gate, of a tenement worth 1
2d
in rental, lying west of St John Street adjacent to the priory, in the parish of St Sepulchre Newgate. Two days later, Robert re-granted to Peter the same tenement, to hold for life, for nominal payment to Robert and his heirs. Should Peter die, the tenement would revert to Robert.
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Similarly, on 20 July 1349 Thomas de Salisbury and Alice, his wife, granted houses and a quay on the ‘Stonewharf’ between Bere Lane and Thames Street (near the Custom House) to John Nott, Peter de Gilnefford and Thomas de Bonwode. On 22 July Nott and Bonewode handed the property back.
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It may have been the death of Gilnefford, who is absent from the re-grant, that triggered this.

March 1349

In March, the rate at which Londoners were preparing wills increased again: no fewer than eighty-nine were drawn up this month, twelve of them on a single day, the 12th. Over one-quarter of this total were dead before the month was out, and a total of sixty-one wills were enrolled at the Husting court’s four dated meetings: 2, 9, 16 and 23 March. However, it is clear that the system for enrolling the wills was beginning to show some sign of strain. Two enrolments, those of Roger Carpenter, a pepperer in St Benet Sherehog parish, and Stephen atte Holte, a timber-monger in St Michael Cornhill, show that the dates they were drawn up actually post-dated, by five and one day respectively, the court at which they were enrolled – an obvious impossibility.
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It is possible that the will scribes got the dates wrong, it is also possible that there was in fact an additional court held on 30 March, but that the separate dates were not formally entered into the roll as such. Perhaps as experienced clerical staff became victims, they were being replaced by those unused to the standard procedure.

Among the poor tenants of Stepney, the court roll for 19 March 1349 indicates that a total of ninety-two further tenants had died since the previous court on 10 February, bringing the total death toll for the manor to 185 since November. The estimated toll for the whole of March was sixty-six deaths, so while the peak in the manor may have been reached by the end of February, the plague was still almost as deadly through to the beginning of spring.

The impact on families is obvious: victims included five of the atte Walle family, four of the Pod family, three members of the Pentecost family, and a further two Pymmes who had all died in the previous seven weeks. Two of the Cobbe family included one Alexander Cobbe, who was probably the same man as had been elected to represent Portsoken ward on the first Common Council of the city in 1347.
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The date of death of his colleague on the council, farrier Alexander Mareschal, can be narrowed down by a rare crossover between tenancy records from the manor and Husting will enrolments. Mareschal’s Stepney holding was put into the hands of the bishop after 19 March, and his will was enrolled on 23 March, so he must have died between the two dates.
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No relevant Vauxhall court rolls survive.

With such an elevated mortality rate in the city, the deaths of members from more than one generation within individual free families made the arrangements for passing on inheritances complex. Richard de Shordych had drawn up his will on 10 February and was dead by the beginning of March. We do not know what his profession was, but in the will he left a tenement in St Olave Jewry to his son John, and goods and money to Benedict and Margaret, his other children. Richard’s wife Margery had died earlier (at an unknown date) and her family had already inherited property from her; son Benedict had received land in the parish of St Stephen Coleman Street. In the grip of plague, Benedict drew up his own will on 6 March 1349, and was himself dead by the 16th. Father and son appear on the Husting roll almost adjacent. Benedict was obviously one of the executors of his father’s will, but had no time at all to accomplish the execution; in his own will he is able only to set aside the land his mother left him for a chantry in St Olave, and to request his master, John Lacer, to act in his stead as executor for his father’s undischarged will.
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John Lacer, in his turn, may well be the man of that name whose own will was drawn up in April 1349, and who died by the beginning of May.
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If so, property was passing within days from father to son to executor to executor’s nominee(s); the risks in maintaining a clear trail of ownership are obvious.

The emergency cemeteries founded by Bishop Stratford and Walter de Mauny also feature for the first time in the wills of Londoners in March 1349: they had very rapidly become incorporated into the civic landscape. That of Gerard Larmurer was drawn up on 3 March. He probably lived in the parish of St Bride Fleet Street, and made arrangements to leave his estate to his wife Eustacia, and Ralph and Isabella, his children, with a clause that if no heir was forthcoming from them, he would:

leave and ordain that the said possession shall descend to the new chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary outside Aldersgate, to have and to hold in perpetuity, on condition that the … chapel be required … to maintain a priest who shall celebrate mass in perpetuity for the souls of my father and mother, my ancestors and all the faithful departed.
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This is the earliest reference to the chapel that Walter de Mauny had set out to build in his extended cemetery for poor strangers, and indicates that, at the least, groundwork or other preparatory activities for the chapel, such as stockpiling building materials, were under way, and that some citizens at least were aware of de Mauny’s project. The formal foundation ceremony for the chapel took place some three weeks after this will was made, according to the Charterhouse Register. On the Annunciation of Our Lady (25 March) 1349, the Bishop of London:

with the Mayor of the City and the sheriffs, as well as the more eminent citizens who are called aldermen, and many others, nearly all barefooted and with a most devout procession, went to the said cemetery, and there the bishop celebrated and preached a solemn sermon to the people … On the same day the Mayor laid the foundation of the chapel.
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Such a procession, leading as it would have done from the Guildhall itself, via the cathedral and then out through Aldersgate towards the cemetery, would have been quite an occasion at the height of the crisis, and would certainly have served to give hope to the beleaguered citizens. The chapel survived to become the church of the later Carthusian monastery of Charterhouse and its site was excavated in the early 1950s. It was originally a stone building set out on a rectangular plan of four or possibly five bays, measuring approximately 30m in length by 10m wide. Evidence for a dais was found at its eastern end. The walls were of chalk and ragstone, common building materials at this time.
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The West Smithfield cemeteries were evidently still insufficient to cope with the numbers of dead; more space for burial was required and consequently a third cemetery was established, again just beyond the walls, on the eastern side of the city at Tower Hill. The origin of this cemetery is somewhat less clear than that in West Smithfield, but it must have been founded just a little after. The story begins several years prior to the plague’s appearance, with the decision of one John Cory to acquire land on Tower Hill. John Cory was a royal servant with particular skills in numbers and accounts. He was collecting debts for the Crown in Exeter in 1341, and became surveyor of weights and measures for Devon, Somerset and Dorset between 1342 and 1344. By May 1346 he was working for the Black Prince in Devon, and in 1349 he was appointed as the prince’s Attorney General in Chancery, the Exchequer and before the justices of both Benches. He had a house in the parish of St Michael Queenhithe by 1353.

There may be reason to believe that Cory was acquiring land on Tower Hill on behalf of the king for the foundation of a monastery on the site. The earliest such acquisition was in May 1346, of a brewery owned by Richard le Botoner, a London pepperer.
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The brewery was situated between the road on Tower Hill on the west and a field called ‘Horselegfurlong’ on the east. Acquisition of similar tenements and lands on Tower Hill, between Hog Street and East Smithfield, continued throughout 1348. However, in 1349, ‘at the urging of substantial men of the City’, and with the agreement of Nicholas, prior of Holy Trinity priory, Aldgate, Cory asked Bishop Stratford to consecrate part of his holdings, probably the Horselegfurlong field, as a burial ground.
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The cartulary of the priory indicates that it is this connection that provided the cemetery with its name: the churchyard of the Holy Trinity.

The scale of the cemetery was not that of de Mauny’s (see Fig. 4). It measured initially 147 ells by 93 ells on its longest sides – roughly 170m by 107m or about 4 acres in all – and was walled around with an earthen bank. Exactly when it was consecrated is not stated, but a priory document of the mid-1360s cites the inadequacy of existing space for the burial of victims as the reason,
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so it was most probably after November 1348, and the best guess is January or February 1349, immediately after Cory obtained the field, and perhaps just a few weeks later than de Mauny’s cemetery.

By Easter Sunday, 12 April, a chapel was either planned or being built, since the will of Andrew Cros, a fishmonger, drawn up on that date, specified his wish to ‘leave my body to be buried in the cemetery of Holy Trinity next to the Tower of London … [with] 5s for the works of the chapel there
[operi capelle ibidem]’.
Similarly, the will of Johanna, wife of John de Colchester, also a fishmonger, requested her body ‘to be buried in the new cemetery of Holy Trinity next to the Tower of London … [leaving] 20s for the works of the chapel of the said cemetery’. This will was made out on 22 April.
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The identity of the ‘substantial men of the City’ who saw the need for additional burial space is something of a mystery. The term does not suggest the mayor and aldermen, who would have been easy to define, but rather a syndicate of influential citizens. One of the parcels of land acquired by Cory came from Thomas de Cotyngham,
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perhaps the same Thomas Cotyngham who was one of the king’s advisers and who would receive the great seal on the order of the king following the death of John de Offord in May 1349. Other prominent Londoners with links to the site include Andrew Cros, who willed burial in the cemetery and whose kinswoman, Helena Cros, was to pass further adjacent lands to Cory in 1350
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suggesting family connections; Johanna de Colcestre, among the earliest recorded to have willed burial in April; and finally, William de Shordych, a goldsmith, whose will, made in May 1349, named Prior Nicholas as the guardian of his son.
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In any event, the first three months of the year thus saw two new churches rising to serve the city over the coming months, specifically dedicated to the salvation of the souls of plague victims through the intercession on the one hand of the Virgin Mary, with her particular power to avert the wrath of God, and on the other the Holy Trinity.

The scale of the pestilence continued to interfere with the business of running the kingdom and the city. On 10 March the king accepted the fact that his postponement of the January Parliament would effectively have to be indefinite. He wrote:

Whereas lately, by reason of the deadly pestilence then prevailing, we caused the Parliament that was summoned to meet at Westminster on the Monday after the Feast of St Hilary to be prorogued until the quinzaine of Easter next – and because the aforesaid pestilence is increasing with more than its usual severity, in Westminster and in the City of London and the surrounding districts, whereby the coming of the magnates and other of our faithful lieges to that place at this time would probably be too dangerous – for this, and for certain other obvious reasons we have thought fit to postpone the said Parliament until we shall issue further summons.
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What the king meant by ‘usual severity’ is unclear. It may indicate the frequency with which late winter or spring pestilences occurred in London, or it may indicate that London was considered to be especially hard hit in the current outbreak. Royal business that did carry on in London at this time included the undertaking of Inquisitions Post Mortem, surveys undertaken after the death of a tenant in chief to establish the estates held and the rightful successor(s). The pestilence dramatically increased this workload nationally, and at least one survey, of the Middlesex lands of one Roger Bedyngfield, was held at West Smithfield on 11 March. Later examples included that of Hugh le Despenser on 22 April 1349, conducted by John Lovekyn as mayor and escheator for the city.
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