The Black Death (26 page)

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On 28 July 1348, Archbishop Zouche of York had taken alarm at the news from the Continent and sent out a warning order to his flock:

‘In so far as the life of men upon earth is warfare,’ he wrote,

The Archbishop prescribed the usual course of prayer, processions and litanies to avert the coming of the dreadful pestilence.

When the Archbishop thus addressed his flock, the Black Death had hardly arrived in England. Nearly ten months were to elapse before the first cases were recorded in Yorkshire. For the Englishmen in the south, who had heard with alarm of the
terrible
plague in Europe, the situation had seemed perilous enough. But France was another country, the Channel lay between; ‘it can’t happen here’ was then, as always, the reaction of the
Englishman
confronted by disorder among the lesser breeds without
the law. But such comfort could not last long. From the moment that the plague got a firm grip in Dorset it must have been clear to every well informed Englishman that, in the end, his turn would come. The more pious or the more optimistic no doubt continued to hope that some miracle would avert their doom but, as the plague moved inexorably northwards, even the most
confident
must have lost their faith.

Though he may have discounted some of the wilder rumours, any northerner who kept his ears open in the spring of 1349 must have been led to believe that, in all probability, he had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the rest of the year. His family and friends could be expected to die around him and those in authority over him were more than likely to join him in the churchyard. Life, as he knew it, seemed on the verge of breaking down. Faced with such a threat the temptation must have been great to eat, drink, be merry and do little else besides. It is notable that, whether through apathy, self-discipline or the resignation that comes from perfect faith, there seems to have been no such reaction. Until the moment that the plague reached his village – with a minor exception in Durham which we shall mention shortly – even, indeed, when it was already rampant, the average northerner continued to till his fields, tend his cattle and
perform
his manorial duties. The threat of infection was not enough; only death, it seemed, could distract him from his daily duties.

Though the mortality in Yorkshire was not quite so wholesale as in other counties, certainly much less so than in neighbouring Lincolnshire, the Black Death was far from merciful. In the 535 parishes of the diocese of York, of which the great majority were in Yorkshire itself, 223 benefices were vacated by death,
sixty-three
by resignation and a further fourteen from unspecified causes. Between 42 per cent and 45 per cent of the parish clergy died.

The huge archdeaconry of York shows the usual wide variants in the mortality rate from area to area. The deanery of Doncaster lost nearly 59
per cent of its clergy, yet virtually no benefices were vacated in the marshes between Doncaster and the
Humber
. In Pontefract the figure was 40 per cent, again with few or
no casualties in the eastern flats. And yet in the mountainous district of Craven which, on the analogy of Derbyshire, should have suffered severely, a mere 27 per cent perished. York itself, with 32 per cent, was relatively lightly touched.

In so vast a county it will be obvious that the Black Death could not have arrived everywhere at the same time. It is most unlikely that more than a handful of cases occurred before April 1349; Pope Clement VI’s Bull of 23 March from Avignon
referred
to the plague as having already begun to harass the
diocese
but it seems certain that this was premature and that, even if there had been an outbreak in March or early April, it was confined to Nottinghamshire or perhaps to one or two coastal areas. It did not arrive in the city of York until 21 May. June, July and August were the worst months all over the north of England.

The Archbishop of York held to his normal practice and
discreetly
sat out the summer months at one or other of his rural manors near the little town of Ripon.
20
His suffragan, however, Archbishop Hugh of Damascus, behaved with a vigour unusual in a senior churchman. He was an Austin friar who had once been excommunicated by Archbishop Grandisson for outrageous behaviour.
21
This unconventional background perhaps explained why he so far forgot his rank as to tour his diocese, visit the sick, encourage the healthy and consecrate many new churchyards. These were usually only authorized for temporary use and the citizens of Fulford, a mile or so south of York, found themselves in trouble some years later when they persisted in burying their dead in their new churchyard of St Oswald long after the Black Death had passed. Archbishop Thoresby, in a curious
commentary
on the pleasures of the times, accused them of ‘taking an empty delight in novelty’ and ordered them to resort forthwith to their traditional burial ground.
22

York was one of the largest cities in England; smaller only than London and, perhaps, Norwich. Professor Russell
23
estimates the population in 1377 at 10,872. B y that date economic
expansion
had already been resumed and the plague, destructive though it was, provided no more than a check in a process which lasted till the end of the century.
24
But, at the time of the Black
Death, the city was already in difficulties, since a disastrous flood had submerged its western parishes on 31 December 1348.
25
Jeanselme
, who contends that floods, famines and earthquakes invariably precede an epidemic of plague, indeed cites the flooding of the Ouse as evidence of his thesis.
26
It is hard to see why, in that case, the plague should have spread with equal vigour to all the other cities where the Ouse did not overflow and no earthquake or famine took place. But one can accept that the
commotion
which the sudden flood must have caused among the rats of York could have helped the spread of infection throughout the city and the neighbourhood.

At the Abbey of Meaux, six miles north of Hull, the monks were already expecting the worst. On the Friday before Passion Sunday, they recalled, they had been violently thrown from their stalls by an earthquake. Such a portent could only have meant trouble to come. When it was coupled with the undoubtedly sinister birth of Siamese twins in Kingston-upon-Hull and their death a few days before, then even the most sceptical could hardly have doubted the imminence of disaster. Disaster duly came. ‘… God’s providence ordained at that time’, wrote the
chronicler
of the monastery, ‘that in many places the chaplains were kept alive to the very end of the pestilence in order to bury the dead; but after this burial of the lay folk the chaplains themselves were devoured by the plague, as the others had been before them.’
27
The Abbot, Hugh de Leven, and five monks died in a single day, on 12 August 1349; the prior, the cellarer, the bursar and seventeen other monks died also and, out of fifty monks and lay brethren, the chronicler claims that only ten survived.
28
The Abbey found its revenues so reduced that it was forced to lease its grange for life to a certain Sir William de Swine for a lump payment of
£
80. Whether by divine intervention, coincidence or monkish initiative, Sir William was murdered shortly afterwards and the grange reverted to the Abbey. But, in spite of this
windfall,
recovery was slow and, in 1354, the Abbey was handed over to a royal commission ‘on account of its miserable condition’.
29

The countryside around Hull seems to have been ravaged simultaneously by plague and by the flooding of the Rivers Hull and Humber. An inquisition post-mortem at Hemingbrough
showed pasture normally worth 12d. trampled down and
valueless
. ‘The herdsmen were lying in the churchyard’.
30
All the
bondigers
and carters of the Abbey of Selby were dead so that turves and hay had to be carried by water. As for Hull itself, the King in 1353 remitted certain taxes: ‘… considering the waste and destruction which our town of Kingston-on-Hull has suffered, both through the overflow of the waters of the Humber and other causes, and that a great part of the people of the said town have died in the last deadly pestilence which raged in these parts and that the remnant left in the town are so desolate and poverty-stricken’.
31
At Wharram Percy the population of the parish was so reduced that, shortly after the Black Death, the side aisles of the church were pulled down and never rebuilt.

But in Yorkshire as elsewhere the structure of government was strained but substantially survived. A curious illustration of this comes from the city of York itself. On 7 August 1349 a jury certified that William Needler had died ‘a natural and not violent death by reason of the pestilence in Coppergate, York’. There must have been some decidedly suspicious circumstances about his death if, when so many were perishing, it was found
necessary
to conduct an inquest. But the fact that it was possible to assemble a jury and record a verdict according to the due
processes
of the law at a time when the epidemic in the city must have been at or near its peak is an impressive tribute to the civic sense of the inhabitants or, perhaps, to the discipline with which the authorities imposed their rule.

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Lancashire was at this date one of the most thinly populated of the English counties. One area about which an unusual amount of information exists is the deanery of Amounderness to the west of the county, including the parishes of Preston,
Lancaster
and Blackpool. The Archdeacon of Richmond and his proctor, and Dean of Amounderness, had a dispute about certain fees for the probate of wills. A jury was set up to inquire into the question. They viewed the statistics presented to them with a certain amount of scepticism but no alternative totals were
suggested
and figures of this kind at least carry slightly more
conviction
than the vague calculations of the chronicles. In the ten
parishes of Amounderness it was claimed, 13,180 people died between 8 September 1349 and 11 January 1350. In the parish of Preston 3,000 died, in Poulton-le-Fylde, it was said, 800 died; in Lancaster, 3,000; Garstang, 2,000 and Kirkham, 3,000.
32

Even allowing for the enormous size of the parishes and some inflation in the estimates of the dead it seems that Amounderness must have suffered worse than the regional average. But evidence is scarce. At Rochdale where the parson died, there was a gap of eight months before the vacancy was filled, but this could be accounted for by inefficiency on the part of the diocesan
authorities
as well as by the high mortality. A curious entry is found in the Assize Rolls. A certain William of Liverpool ‘caused one third of the inhabitants of Everton to be brought to his house after death’; presumably with the intention of carrying out
cut-price
funerals and so cheating the lord of the manor and the church authorities. Since it was widely assumed that the plague was caught from the dead, his courage deserves praise as well as his business acumen.
33

Of Cumberland still less is known. In this county, the diocesan registers are lacking; a tribute not so much to the Black Death as to the havoc wrought by the invading Scots. But though the Scots prepared the ground it was the plague which finally
dislocated
the agricultural economy. The accounts of Richard de Den ton, former Vice-Sheriff, presented for audit in 1354, show vividly what damage had been done. Because of ‘the mortal
pestilence
lately raging in those parts’, he reported, ‘the greater parts of the manor lands attached to the King’s Castle at Carlisle’ were still lying uncultivated. For eighteen months after the end of the plague, indeed, the entire estate had been let go to waste ‘for lack of labourers and divers tenants. Mills, fishing, pastures and meadow lands could not be let during that time for want of tenants willing to take the farms of those who died in the said plague.’ The jury found that Richard de Den ton had proved his facts and accepted the greatly reduced value of the estate.
34
The city of Carlisle was relieved of many of its taxes in 1352 because ‘it is rendered void and, more than usual, is depressed by the mortal pestilence’.

Durham too had suffered severely from the incursions of
marauding Scots. In 1346 they had invaded in greater numbers than ever before. Under the sacred banner of St Cuthbert, Bishop Hatfield had taken the field and repelled them. But, though the victory was decisive, it had not come in time to save the
Palatinate
from devastation. Against such a background it is not surprising that the morale of the inhabitants should have been frail even before the threat of the Black Death became imminent. Durham is almost the only county in England where there is any evidence of panic spreading before the arrival of the epidemic and it is reasonable to see a link between this and the recent
tribulations
of the area. Yet even here no very dramatic evidence of demoralization is to be found.