The Black Death in London (24 page)

In June, will-making peaked at thirty-three, with a quarter of these dating to the three days of the 12th to the 14th. The plague continued to strike rapidly. William Derby, a tailor, made his will on 5 June and was dead and buried at the foot of his father’s tomb in the church of St Mary Aldermary by the 12th, when his wife Agnes made her will to be buried at his side under a marble slab.
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One of the important figures in London’s civic administration who drew up wills at this time was Thomas de Walden, former Chamberlain of the Guildhall and principal apothecary of Westminster Abbey since at least 1340. His will was not enrolled until 1362, but his servant and executor, John of Hurley, issued a general release of his role as executor and of Walden’s own role as executor to a third party (a cheesemonger called Walter de Blechynglye) to Simon Langham, Abbot of Westminster, on 29 September 1361.
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Such a release indicates the death of Walden between June and September of that year.

The will of another apothecary, John Offham, was the subject of a remarkable delay in enrolment. Offham, who probably lived in the vicinity of Milk Street, made his will on 16 April and was dead before 26 June, when his son Peter was placed under the guardianship of Thomas Frowyk by the court (Offham’s wife and other child, alive in April, were not mentioned so had presumably also perished). The will, however, would wait an astonishing thirty-two years before enrolment in March 1393.
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An example of a will not enrolled in Husting but which survived in copy form in Chancery was that of William de Neuton, dated 28 June. Probate occurred three weeks later on 19 July. He desired burial in St Stephen Walbrook, leaving money for services for his soul for five years following his death.
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One tragic aspect of these wills is the appearance in the Husting rolls of a cluster of fathers wishing to be buried alongside their child or children. Hugh le Peyntor was the most famous of these. He was the same Hugh who had been appointed master painter for the chapel of St Stephen Westminster in March 1350, and was destined to survive until the third outbreak. He nevertheless kept his will dated 16 June 1361, stating his desire to be buried next to his child in the churchyard of St Giles Cripplegate;
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William Wyle on 20 June chose his burial plot adjacent to the tomb of Alice his daughter in the church of St Sepulchre Newgate; Robert Forneux, a fishmonger, willed burial next to his children in the church of St Leonard Eastcheap (one child survived); and Walter de Chendyngton wished burial next to his children in the churchyard of St Dunstan in the West. The appearance of such cases two months into the plague may indicate that children were among the earlier victims of the outbreak, and may explain why it was considered to have been so virulent among the young. As we will see, the archaeological evidence for the plague’s impact on children is less clear-cut than the chroniclers’ reports would imply.

Hugh le Peyntor’s will, starting with an apt Biblical quote, ‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live’, favoured his local church, St Giles, with bequests to the lights (candles) of the painters, the Holy Trinity, St Mary, and the Fraternity of St George; he also favoured the religious recluses in the vicinity of London and left money to the anchoresses of St Giles, St Benedict and ‘St Mary de Manny’ (Walter de Mauny’s chapel in the West Smithfield plague cemetery); and the hermits of St Lawrence Jewry, Charing Cross, Bishopsgate and ‘beyond the Thames’. Le Peyntor’s will was not the only one which made bequests to one of London’s religious fraternities. A total of thirteen wills made such directions during the plague, equivalent to 10 per cent of all Husting wills drawn up in the plague months, a rate of over six times that in the first plague. If the first plague acted as a catalyst for bequests to these local, craft-based religious groups, then the second outbreak confirmed their importance in the eyes of London’s wealthier testators.

Twelve enrolments were made before the court recessed in mid-June; of these ten had been drawn up since the beginning of the plague. One testator, draper Richard atte Moire, whose will was made on 26 April and proved on 14 June, left bequests to both emergency cemeteries at ‘Newchurchehawe’ and at ‘Holy Trinity de la Newchurchehawe near to the Tower’,
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providing important additional confirmation that both the West and East Smithfield cemeteries were still recognised, and were presumably being pressed into use once more for the burial of plague victims. Other wills enrolled in June included Alice de Northall, wife of John, alderman of the city, who had died during the first plague exactly twelve years earlier. Alice chose her burial place by the tomb of her husband in the chapel of St John in the church of St Nicholas Acon.
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Of significance also are two wills proved in June which made arrangements to leave money to the ‘perpetual chaplains’ of St Paul’s Cathedral residing in the precinct in a ‘common hall’ near the dean’s mansion.
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This coincides with a significant increase in will-makers’ wishes to be buried at the cathedral during this outbreak, rising in frequency from about 2.5 per cent per annum following the first plague, to over 8 per cent of wills during the
pestis secunda
. An especial focus was the Pardon churchyard there – in June, 12 per cent of will-makers chose that location, and overall, during the second outbreak, fifteen wills (around 11 per cent of the total drawn up) identified it as a preferred burial location. The popularity of this particular churchyard may have been enhanced by an indulgence (as was probably the case in the first plague), the support for the chaplains helping to ensure plentiful intercessory prayers for the souls of the victims and their families.

The plague evidently breached the walls of the Tower of London in June, for the king gave licence for two of his noble French hostages, no less than the son of the French king, Louis, Duke of Anjou, and one Lord Mauleverer:

[each,] for his health’s sake, to go from London, where he is obliged to stay as one of the hostages for the performance of the peace with France, to any place within the realm for one month from Monday next, on condition that at the end of the month he present himself before the king or his council in London, as he has promised, to remain a hostage.

One of the knights responsible for the monitoring of the prisoners was Walter de Mauny.
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The option provided to the French hostages appears to have been a valuable one. John of Byker, the king’s master of artillery in the Tower, made his will on 19 June and was dead before 1 July, the day the king granted the office to his son, Patrick, on 12
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a day (around £18 per annum). John’s will was proved three weeks later in the Husting court. Andrew de Turri, the king’s smith in the Tower, also perished at about this time. His will is not dated, but in early August the king granted his office to Stephen atte Merssh, ‘as much and in such manner as Master Andrew de Turri, late the king’s smith took’.
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A third officer of the Tower may also have succumbed: on 30 August the king issued an arrest warrant for two men who had taken the assets of William de Rothewelle, the keeper of the king’s warderobe in the Tower. The latter, in debt to the king, was described as having ‘departed this life, and not yet rendered account of such jewels and things’.
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The plague was still passing through the Tower in September when Sir Thomas of Moray, a Scottish hostage imprisoned since 1357 in the Tower to ensure the repayment of David II of Scotland’s ransom, and not apparently given leave of absence, contracted the plague and died there sometime before Michaelmas.
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Outside the Tower, another of the king’s London servants, John Malewayn, who held the office of ‘tronage and pesage’ (duties paid for the official weighing of merchandise) of wool imports and exports through London, made his will on 10 June, dying before 28 June. He was buried near his wife in the church of Holy Trinity priory, Aldgate. The king passed the office for life to John Wroth, the Mayor of London.
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Malewayn may have died at what Italian merchants reported was the peak of the outbreak: the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani recorded (quite accurately) that the plague had broken out in London in April and (now difficult to prove) that at its peak on 24 June, 1,200 people perished.
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Royal favourites were frequently rewarded with corrodies (pensions) within the precincts of particular religious houses. Such people were by no means immune to the pestilence, and at least two corrodians may have died in the priory of St Saviour Bermondsey during the second plague. On 30 June the king sent John Romeseye, one of his esquires, to the prior of Bermondsey, ‘to have such maintenance of that house for life as Geoffrey de Sessoun and Colet his wife had’, implying that the couple had recently passed away. Another death that occurred there between February and November 1361 was that of William Turk, a citizen and fishmonger favoured by the king since at least the 1330s. In May 1355 a royal grant for life had provided him with a yearly pension of £20 in the priory, a robe of the suit of the priory’s esquires, or 20s every Christmas, and two cartloads of good hay yearly from the priory meadows at Bermondsey. The grant itself refers back to a previous royal grant of a house and land within the priory, and we may be sure that Turk lived within the precincts. His will, written and dated 4 February 1361, ‘within the cloister’ of the priory (named erroneously ‘St Mary de Suthwerke’), shows that he enjoyed his pension for over five years. It requested his burial according to the directions of John Asshewell, one of the monks (most likely in the priory church or cemetery), and left the generous sum of 100 marks to the priory.
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Such corrodies could be extremely expensive for the host priory, especially given the impact that the plague had on labour and prices. In the face of the death toll, the king’s closure of the court of the Common Bench until midsummer proved optimistic, and on 23 June he was forced to extend the closure until September, ordering Robert Thorpe and other justices to adjourn all pleas for Trinity and midsummer in the exact state at which they were ‘by reason of the plague both in the City and neighbouring parts’.
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July brought no relief from the misery. The national scale of the epidemic is confirmed by the issue of a letter by the Archbishop of York, John Thoresby, dated the 12th of that month. Its content and recommendations for prayers were very similar to instructions issued in 1348, and these were surely spread to Londoners with haste:

the Kingdom of England has been assailed with … pestilences and other misfortunes, directed at driving away the sins of men, on such a scale and for such a long time … Therefore we believe it is important to urge, more devoutly and insistently, suffrages of devout prayer and other offices of pious propitiation.
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Thirty-three further wills were drawn up during the month. One such was for the widow Alice Outepenne, daughter of a William de Derby, who desired burial in the Pardon churchyard of St Paul’s next to her husband. It may be that her father was the William de Derby buried in St Mary Aldermary less than a month before.
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Two former mayors also prepared for the worst: Henry Picard, mayor in 1357–8, drew up his will on 3 July, but survived the plague; Richard de Kislingbury was not so lucky and died mid-month. Swifter still was the passing of Richard Lacer, a merchant of Bromley (in Kent) with interests in London. His will was dated 27 July 1361, yet that of his wife Isabella, drawn up just two days later, described her as ‘relict of Richard, late mercer’. The gap between death and enrolment was a considerable one – both Lacer wills were enrolled four months later at the end of November.
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The plague stalked the halls of the royal palace at Westminster as well as the city streets. On 6 August the king granted to his servant John de Saxton the prebend which John Leche, who died shortly before on 21 July, had in the chapel of St Stephen there.
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The Husting court, suspended as usual for the Boston fair from 17 June, resumed in late July and a total of thirty-nine wills were enrolled in the two remaining sessions that month. Of these, only four wills had been drawn up before the outbreak of the pestilence and thirty dated to June or July. Given the time-lag between death and enrolment, and the delay for the Boston fair, it is very probable that all these victims died within just a few days of writing their wills. Judging by the rate at which wills were being drawn up and enrolled, the death rate by high summer was comparable with that of January 1349, marking the outbreak as a very serious one indeed.

Despite the availability of the extra-mural plague cemeteries, burial space seems once again to have been an issue. On 26 July the king gave licence for the transfer by Simon de Mordon and his wife Alice to John de Hoghton, parson of the church of St Martin Orgar in Candelwykstrete, of a plot of land in London, 47ft long and 33ft broad (approximately 14m x 10m), situated between St Martin’s churchyard and the church of St Michael in Crokedelane, ‘for the enlargement of the said churchyard’.
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