The Black Death in London (31 page)

Charitable bequests to assist poor hermits, anchorites and anchoresses also rapidly increased during the plague decades. These lone religious men and women, usually attached to churches, were reliant entirely on the generosity of the community. Hermits were able to leave their cells and undertake good works on behalf of the community, while anchorites and anchoresses were effectively confined, spending their lives in prayer. They were neither numerous nor widespread in London but they must have been well known. Husting wills before 1341 would not normally make any reference to them, since testators generally supported them with pecuniary bequests which were not included in the will until after this date. The great majority of the wills did not specify individual recluses, preferring presumably to leave the choice of beneficiary to the executor. These normally thus stated that a sum of money was to go to each anchorite and hermit of London, for example.

Some were much more specific, however, and from these we learn that there were anchorites associated with the churches of St Benet Fink and St Peter Cornhill (by 1345), St Giles Cripplegate (1348), St Lawrence Jewry, St Botolph Bishopsgate and Charing Cross (by 1361), the Swan’s Nest (east of the Tower of London, by 1371), St Giles leper hospital (1373), and St Katherine’s hospital by the Tower (a friar, John Ingram, by 1380). A hermit was resident at the chapel at the Newchurchehawe cemetery at West Smithfield by 1361.
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Anchoresses and ‘female recluses’ are also mentioned.

Altogether, seventy-six bequests were made between 1345 and 1398, so charity was relatively rare; but, as with the fraternities, the frequency rises from less than 2 per cent of wills in the decade 1349–58, to a steady average of 10 per cent in the last three decades of the century. The reputation of lone religious recluses lay in their particular intercessory powers – their prayers were seen to be potent, even among other forms of religious intercession – and here, surely, lies the reason for their increasing popularity in the wake of the visible sign of heavenly displeasure that was the pestilence.

Another group increasingly, and perhaps surprisingly, favoured with personal charitable bequests was London’s lepers. Fear of infection from the disease did, of course, exist prior to the pestilence. As early as 1277, the city forbade any lepers within the walls, and Edward III’s edict of 1346 requesting the removal of lepers from the city and suburbs made it clear that royal concern was in combating ‘the evils and perils which from the cause aforesaid may unto the said city, and the whole of our realm’. The impact of this edict is unknown, but following the first outbreak, the city felt able to use the concerns about mixing lepers with healthy citizens to attempt to argue for the replacement at St Giles leper hospital of (apparently healthy) members of the Order of St Lazarus with leprous Londoners in 1354; evidence of other attempts to restrict the entry of lepers followed in the 1370s. In 1372 a leprous baker was expelled from the city after being ‘oftentimes before … commanded by the Mayor and Aldermen to depart from the City’; on 27 August 1375 (so at the end of the fourth outbreak) a further city edict saw gate porters charged with ensuring no lepers entered the city, and managers at the Hackney leper hospital and the Lock in Southwark charged with not letting lepers leave those houses. In November 1375 the authorities proclaimed that ‘no lazar shall go about in the said city … and that every constable and beadle shall have power to take such persons, and bring them to Cornhill and put them in the stocks’.
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The link between plague and the control of leprosy appears to have continued into the fifteenth century.
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It could, therefore, be argued that the heightened awareness of the threat of contagion intensified efforts to segregate sufferers from the rest of society. It may be that there was a perceived link between episodes of plague visited upon a hapless populace by a wrathful God intent on punishment for sin, and the visible scourge of leprosy, itself considered to be a disease brought on by immorality and sin. However, the urgency with which the authorities appear to have prosecuted their control over access to the city by lepers needs to be examined against the broader backdrop of increasingly numerous bequests by citizens to improve the lot of these sufferers. An analysis of the calendar of Husting wills shows that specific bequests to lepers, or lazars as they were occasionally termed, only appear during the first plague outbreak of 1349. There are none earlier. During that outbreak, and the decade following, just under 2 per cent of all wills provided for lepers. This figure rose between 1359 and 1368 to 6 per cent, and then increased dramatically to 14 per cent by 1378. The numbers remained constant at about 10 per cent of Husting wills until
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. 1400 (see Fig. 15). Thereafter, such bequests become very rare, but persist until the 1480s.

The importance of the three principal leper houses (the Lock just south of the Southwark urban settlement, the hospital of St Giles-in-the-Fields to the west of the city, and the leper hospital at Hackney, about 2 miles north of Bishopsgate), and the less-favoured hospital at St James Westminster, seems clear from such evidence, though it would need to be substantiated by a close analysis of the Archdeaconry and Commissary Court probates for the last two decades of the century. It is further supported from studies of Norwich, Yarmouth, Scarborough and Beverley which suggest an even greater and longer-lived popularity following the plague.
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The increasing favour in which Londoners held lepers as objects of charity after the pestilence provides a balance to the regulatory controls under which sufferers were placed, and supports recent research suggesting that the common, essentially Victorian, vision of the terrifying, unclean, contagious bell-ringers is a too simplistic way of characterising medieval approaches to this tragic disease.
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While a link between leprosy and pestilence may have been established, the inmates of the hospitals were the subject of pity and their intercessory prayers were considered to be highly effective.

The most tightly regulated and confined social group to benefit from changes in charitable giving after the first pestilence was that of prisoners. In common with others, we do not see major gift-giving at all before 1341 since the wills did not include pecuniary bequests, but a clear increase in charitable bequests can be seen over the plague period. London had five principal gaols by the late fourteenth century: Newgate, Ludgate, the Fleet (all dating to before the fourteenth century), and across the river in Southwark, King’s Bench (from 1368) and Marshalsea (from 1373).
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Conditions in London gaols were hard. Inmates were expected to live off their own means or charity, and if that was not forthcoming, it could spell disaster.

The Newgate ordinances of the early fifteenth century indicate that gaolers could and did intercept alms, and the (incomplete) Coroners’ Rolls record fifty deaths within Newgate in the years 1322–6 and 1338–40, at least two of which (in 1322) were from starvation. From the late fourteenth century, different zones existed in Newgate: imprisoned citizens had rooms with privies and chimneys (men on the north side of the prison, women on the south); foreigners and inferiors had ‘less convenient cells’ (in another part); and those guilty of major crimes were incarcerated in the basement cells (also on the south side).
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Bequests to assist prisoners emerge for the first time in the Husting wills in 1346, but rise sharply after the first outbreak, to 5 per cent in the 1360s – the decade of the second and third plagues – and an average of about 10 per cent of all wills made between 1370 and 1400. This form of charity became firmly established, appearing in an average of 25 per cent of a sample of wills from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury covering the period 1400–1530.
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The sums were sometimes significant. John de Pulteney, for example, left 4 marks annually to prisoners in Newgate. A link to the pestilence seems to be confirmed by the fact that the rate of bequests for wills specifically made within the months of the
pestis secunda
in 1361 was 11 per cent. The motivation behind such charity seems to focus on the poverty of prisoners; John Scorfeyn’s personal concern in his will of 1389 was ‘for poor prisoners, more especially women, in Ludgate and Newgate’.
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Citizens will no doubt have been well aware of their perilous situation and several wills refer to the redemption of poor prisoners, aiming to effect the release of those unable to find the money to pay off their debts.

Developing in parallel with this shift in charitable bequests was an increasing concern for the location and nature of burial. This manifested itself at three levels: the first was in the selection of particular churches or religious houses for burial; the second was in the decision to be buried within the church or chapel, or outside; and the third was the degree of precision provided for the burial. The clearest measure of change can be seen in the number of people who specified a location at all. The Husting wills only begin to mention burial location in 1275, but it is very rarely recorded between then and about 1339 when the practice of stating a preference for a particular church or religious house begins to gain popularity. From January 1347 through to the essential cessation of the first plague outbreak in July 1349, only 44 per cent of Husting will-makers specified where they wished to be buried. Between August 1349 and March 1361, this figure rose dramatically to 74 per cent, rising again to 88 per cent during the second pestilence. By the end of 1375 it had reached 96 per cent.

There seems little doubt that Londoners felt a greatly increased need to express their choice of burial site. Of those naming their preferred church, most felt the need to further specify either an intramural burial (averaging 67.7 per cent) or burial in a churchyard (27.4 per cent). This ratio seems not to have changed across the period in any meaningful way. Notable within this general trend is the rapid increase in popularity of St Paul’s Cathedral, and especially the Pardon churchyard there. The name appears first in April 1349, but only one will (of 392 dated between 1 November 1348 and I August 1349) makes reference during the first plague; between the first and second plagues, the frequency rose to 2.5 per cent (4 of 160 wills between August 1349 and March 1361),
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and during the three months of the second plague it jumped rapidly to 12.1 per cent (16 of 132 wills), remaining at over 9 per cent thereafter (to the end of the 1370s). This contrasts strongly with the frequency of such testators requesting burial in the new cemeteries founded at East and West Smithfield, where the numbers average less than 1 per cent throughout the fourteenth century, and suggests that the wealthy developed a preference for the city’s mother church in times of crisis, rather than adopting the newer institutions founded to cater for those crises. The friaries were poorly represented: between 1348 and 1370 only eight testators chose them for burial. This is perhaps surprising, given the fact that 175 testators left bequests during the same period to the four principal friaries.
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An increasing number of testators specified burial adjacent to a family member or loved one. The frequency was just 10 per cent up to the end of the first outbreak, but doubled to 21 per cent in the following decade, and rose again during and after the second plague to 24 per cent. It reached a height of 30 per cent in the third plague, but then appears to have fallen away to 12 per cent until the end of 1377. A comparative study on a sample of the Commissary Court wills from 1380 to 1541 concluded that between 18 and 60 per cent of testators identified a specific burial location;
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so it may be that burial preference became more frequently expressed in other documents than the Husting enrolments.

The instructions could be very specific, requesting burial within the same tomb as a relative. In the case of John de Rothyng, a vintner, this was taken to considerable extremes. In his will dated 23 May 1375 he requested burial in St James Garlickhythe in the centre of the belfry floor and desired that the bodies of his mother and father be removed from their current location and buried with him.
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Possibly the fragmentation of families as a result of the disaster elicited a strong response for survivors to ensure that they were reunited in death, if not necessarily during life. Noble dynastic mausolea were already well known in major churches across the land, but it might be argued that the plague provided a significant impetus for the development of family plots and vaults for the post-epidemic merchant and artisan classes.

Preparation for the afterlife, for some, involved the foundation of chantries where Masses for the souls of the founder and their family might be sung on a regular basis. Some had elaborate chapels built to house them, within or connected to a church; others were conducted at specified altars within the church. Some were perpetual, involving the allocation of property to generate income to pay for chaplains; others were funded by fraternities from year to year, and more were temporary, paid for by a bequest of money to purchase Masses for a specified period, often one year. The impact of the Black Death was ultimately complex. The national picture of perpetual chantries is one where the plague acted to greatly decrease the number of foundations. Studies of alienation in mortmain (the requirement for a royal licence to pass property to the Church) have shown that there was a dramatic reduction in the foundation of perpetual chantries in England following 1348. This national picture appears to be confirmed by specific studies of chantries in St Paul’s Cathedral. Of eighty-four chantries founded in the cathedral between 1200 and 1548, sixty predate the plague; only seven were founded in the first fifty years after 1349. Noteworthy are the three chantries founded during 1349 as a direct result of the plague, but the trend is clear. Here, though, the plague must be seen as a contributor not the cause, for pressure was already apparent on the space available for new chantries and concerns about the impact of chantries on parish livings.