The writ of 3rd July, 1468, is to the king’s physicians, “sworn to the safe-keeping of our person,” William Hatteclyff, Roger Marschall, and Dominic de Serego, doctors of Arts and Medicine; and the subject of the inquisition is Johanna Nightyngale of Brentwood in Essex, who was presumed by certain of her neighbours to be infected by the foul contagion oflepra, and for whose removal from the common intercourse of men a petition had been laid in Chancery. She had refused to remove herself to a solitary place,prout moris est; the physicians are accordingly ordered to associate with themselves certain legal persons, to inquire whether the woman was leprous, and, if so, to have her removed to a solitary placehonestiori modo quo poteris. On the 1st of November, 1468, the court of inquiry reported that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have been. The woman had been brought before them: they had passed in review twenty-five or more of the commonly reputed signs oflepra, but they had not found that she could be convicted of leprosy from them, or from a sufficient number of them; again, passing in review each of the four species of lepra (alopecia,tinia,leonina, andelephantia) and the forty or more distinctive signs of the species oflepra, they found not that the woman was marked by any of the species oflepra, but that she was altogether free and immune from every species oflepra[202].
The writ of 3rd July, 1468, is to the king’s physicians, “sworn to the safe-keeping of our person,” William Hatteclyff, Roger Marschall, and Dominic de Serego, doctors of Arts and Medicine; and the subject of the inquisition is Johanna Nightyngale of Brentwood in Essex, who was presumed by certain of her neighbours to be infected by the foul contagion oflepra, and for whose removal from the common intercourse of men a petition had been laid in Chancery. She had refused to remove herself to a solitary place,prout moris est; the physicians are accordingly ordered to associate with themselves certain legal persons, to inquire whether the woman was leprous, and, if so, to have her removed to a solitary placehonestiori modo quo poteris. On the 1st of November, 1468, the court of inquiry reported that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have been. The woman had been brought before them: they had passed in review twenty-five or more of the commonly reputed signs oflepra, but they had not found that she could be convicted of leprosy from them, or from a sufficient number of them; again, passing in review each of the four species of lepra (alopecia,tinia,leonina, andelephantia) and the forty or more distinctive signs of the species oflepra, they found not that the woman was marked by any of the species oflepra, but that she was altogether free and immune from every species oflepra[202].
The ordinance of 21 Edward III. (1346) against the harbouring of lepers in London is the only one of the kind (so far as I know) in English history; the Statutes of the realm contain no reference to lepers or leprosy from first to last; the references in the Rolls of Parliament are to the taxing of their houses and lands. The laws which deprived lepers of marital rights and of heirship appear to have been wholly foreign; in England, leprosy as a bar to succession was made a plea in the law courts. It appears, however, that a law against lepers was made by a Welsh king in the tenth century[203]. It is not easy to realize the state of Welsh society in the tenth century; but we know enough of it in the twelfth century, from the description of Giraldus Cambrensis, to assert with some confidence that “leprosy” might have meant anything—perhaps the “lepra Normannorum[204].”
In Scotland the laws and ordinances, civil and ecclesiastical, against lepers have been more numerous. In 1242 and 1269, canons of the Scots Church were made, ordering that lepers should be separated from society in accordance with general custom. In 1283-84, the statutes of the Society of Merchants, or the Guildry, of Berwick provided that lepers should not enter the borough, and that “some gude man sall gather alms for them.” In 1427 the Parliament of Perth authorised ministers and others to search the parishes for lepers[205].
We conclude, then, that little was made of leprosy by English legislators (rather more by the Scots), just as we have found that in the endowment of charities, the leprous had onlya small share, and that share a somewhat exaggerated one owing to the morbid sentimentality of the chivalrous period. The most liberal estimate of the amount of true leprosy at any time in England would hardly place it so high as in the worst provinces of India at the present day. In the province of Burdwan, with a population of over two millions, which may be taken to have been nearly the population of England in the thirteenth century, there are enumerated 4604 lepers, or 2·26 in every thousand inhabitants. But even with that excessive prevalence of leprosy, and with no seclusion of the lepers, a traveller may visit the province of Burdwan, and not be aware that leprosy is “frightfully common” in it. In medieval England the village leper may have been about as common as the village fool; while in the larger towns or cities, such as London, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Lincoln, true lepers can hardly have been so numerous as the friars themselves, who are supposed to have found a large part of their occupation in ministering to their wants. A rigorous scepticism might be justified, by the absence of any good diagnostic evidence, in going farther than this. But the convergence of probabilities does point to a real prevalence of leprosy in medieval England; and those probabilities will be greatly strengthened by discovering in the then habits of English living avera causafor the disease.
What was there in the medieval manner of life to give rise to a certain number of cases of leprosy in all the countries of Europe? Granting that not all who were calledleprosiandleprosae, were actually the subjects oflepraas correctly diagnosed, and that the misnomer was not unlikely to have been applied in the case of princes, nobles and great ecclesiastics, we have still to reckon with the apparition of leprosy among the people in medieval Europe and with its gradual extinction, an extinction that became absolute in most parts of Europe before the Modern period had begun.
Of the “importation” of leprosy into Britain from somesource outside there can be no serious thought; the words are a meaningless phrase, which no one with a real knowledge of the conditions, nature and affinities of leprosy would care to resort to. The varying types of diseases, or their existence at one time and absence at another, are a reflex of the variations in the life of the people—in food and drink, wages, domestic comfort, town life or country life, and the like. No one doubts that the birth-rate and the death-rate have had great variations from time to time, depending on the greater or less abundance of the means of subsistence, on overcrowding, or other things; and the variation in the birth-rate and death-rate is only the most obvious and numerically precise of a whole series of variations in vital phenomena, of which the successions, alternations, and novelties in the types of disease are the least simple, and least within the reach of mere notional apprehension or mere statistical management. The apparition and vanishing of leprosy in medieval Europe was one of those vital phenomena. It may be more easily apprehended by placing beside it a simple example from our own times.
The pellagra of the North Italian peasantry (and of Roumania, Gascony and some other limited areas) is the nearest affinity to leprosy among the species of disease. Strip leprosy of all its superficial and sentimental characters, analyse its essential phenomena, reduce its pathology to the most correct outlines, and we shall find it a chronic constitutional malady not far removed in type from pellagra. In both diseases there are the early warnings in the excessive sensibility, excessive redness and changes of colour, at certain spots of skin on or about the face or on the hands and feet. In both diseases, permanent loss of sensibility follows the previous exaggeration, blanching of the skin will remain for good at the spots where redness and discoloration were apt to come and go, and these affections of the end-regions of nerves will settle, in less definite way, upon the nervous system at large,—the cerebro-spinal nervous system, or the organic nervous system, or both together. What makes leprosy seem a disease in a different class from that, is the formation of nodules, or lumps, in the regions of affected skin in a certain proportion of the cases. If leprosy were all anaestheticleprosy, its affinities to pellagra would be more quickly perceived; it is because about one-half of it has more or less of the tuberculated character that a diversion is created towards another kind of pathology. But the fact that some cases of leprosy develop nodules along the disordered nerves does not remove the disease as a whole from the class to which pellagra belongs. In both diseases we are dealing essentially with a profound disorder of the nerves and nerve-centres, commencing in local skin-affections which come and go and at length settle, proceeding to implicate the nervous functions generally, impairing the efficiency of the individual, and bringing him to a miserable end. The two diseases diverge each along its own path, leprosy becoming more a hopeless disorder of the nerves of tissue-nutrition, and so taking on a structural character mainly but not exclusively, and pellagra becoming more a hopeless disorder of the organic nervous system (digestion, circulation, etc.) with implication of the higher nervous functions, such as the senses, the intellect, and the emotions, and so taking on a functional character mainly but not exclusively. The correlation of structure and function is one that goes all through pathology as well as biology; and here we find it giving character to each of two chronic disorders of the nervous system, according as the structural side or the functional side comes uppermost.
What, then, are the circumstances of pellagra, and do these throw light upon the medieval prevalence of leprosy? Pellagra has been proved with the highest attainable scientific certainty to be due to a staple diet of bread or porridge made from damaged or spoilt maize. It followed the introduction of maize into Lombardy at an interval of two or three generations, and its distribution corresponds closely to the poorer kinds of maize on colder soils, and to the class of the peasantry who get the worst kind of corn or meal for their food. The cases of the disease among the peasantry of Lombardy and some other maize-growing provinces of Northern Italy, were about one hundred thousand when last estimated; the endowed charitable houses and lunatic asylums are full of them. The connexion of the disease with its causes is perfectly well understood; but the economic questions of starvation wages, of truck, of large farms withbailiffs, and of agricultural usage, have proved too much for the chambers of commerce and the Government; so that there is as yet little or no sign of the decline of pellagra in the richest provinces of Italy. This disease is not mentioned in the Bible, therefore it has no traditional vogue; it is not well suited to knight-errantry, because it is a common evil of whole provinces; its causes are economic and social, therefore there is no ready favour to be earned by systematic attempts to deal with them; and there is absolutely no opening for heroism and self-sacrifice of the more ostentatious kind. These are among the reasons why this great object-lesson of a chronic disorder of nutrition, proceeding steadily before our eyes, has been so little perceived. It is in pellagra, however, that we find the key to the ancient problem of leprosy. The two diseases are closely allied in the insidious approach of their symptoms, in their implicating the tissue-nutrition through the nerves, or the nervous functions through the nutrition, in their cumulating and incurable character, and in their transmissibility by inheritance. Thus nosologically allied, they may be reasonably suspected of having analogous causes; and as we know the cause of modern pellagra to be something noxious in the habitual diet of the people, we may look for the cause of medieval leprosy in something of the same kind.
The dietetic cause is not far to seek, and it cannot be stated better than in the following well-known passage by the philosophical Gilbert White in hisNatural History of Selborne[206]:—
“It must, therefore, in these days be, to a humane and thinking person, a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he contemplates how nearly this pest is eradicated, and observes that a leper is now [1778] a rare sight. He will, moreover, when engaged in such a train of thought, naturally inquire for the reason. This happy change perhaps may have originated and been continued from the much smaller quantity of salted meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; from the use of linen next the skin; from the plenty of bread; and from the profusion of fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in every family. Three or four centuries ago, before there were any enclosures, sown-grasses, field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for winter use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in winteror spring. Hence the marvellous account of vast stores of salted flesh found in the larder of the eldest Spencer even so late in the spring as the 3rd of May (600 bacons, 80 carcases of beef, and 600 muttons)[207]. It was from magazines like these that the turbulent barons supported in idleness their riotous swarms of retainers, ready for any disorder or mischief. But agriculture is now arrived at such pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest meats are killed in the winter; and no man needs eat salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that has money to buy fresh.“One cause of this distemper might be no doubt the quantity of wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons as well as in Lent, which our poor now would hardly be persuaded to touch.... The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all ranks of people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which used, in old days, to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not a little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices.”
“It must, therefore, in these days be, to a humane and thinking person, a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he contemplates how nearly this pest is eradicated, and observes that a leper is now [1778] a rare sight. He will, moreover, when engaged in such a train of thought, naturally inquire for the reason. This happy change perhaps may have originated and been continued from the much smaller quantity of salted meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; from the use of linen next the skin; from the plenty of bread; and from the profusion of fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in every family. Three or four centuries ago, before there were any enclosures, sown-grasses, field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for winter use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in winteror spring. Hence the marvellous account of vast stores of salted flesh found in the larder of the eldest Spencer even so late in the spring as the 3rd of May (600 bacons, 80 carcases of beef, and 600 muttons)[207]. It was from magazines like these that the turbulent barons supported in idleness their riotous swarms of retainers, ready for any disorder or mischief. But agriculture is now arrived at such pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest meats are killed in the winter; and no man needs eat salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that has money to buy fresh.
“One cause of this distemper might be no doubt the quantity of wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons as well as in Lent, which our poor now would hardly be persuaded to touch.... The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all ranks of people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which used, in old days, to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not a little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices.”
Let us add to this, that the meat diet of the poorer class, whether serfs or freemen, would be apt to consist of the more worthless portions, the semi-putrid pieces in the salted sides of bacon, mutton or beef, and that badly-cured pork was in many parts the usual kind of flesh-food; and we shall have no difficulty in finding the noxious element in the diet of the Middle Ages, which the dietetic hypothesis of leprosy requires. Some who have advocated that hypothesis for modern leprosy, have laid themselves open, notwithstanding the ability and industry of their research, to plausible objections which have no bearing if the hypothesis be sufficiently safe-guarded. Leprosy, like every othermorbus miseriae, needs a number of things working together to produce it, its more or less uniform specific character or distinctive mark being determined by the presence of one factor in particular. The special factor should be generalised as much as possible, so as to cover the whole circumstances of leprosy: it is not only half-cured or semi-putrid fish[208], but half-cured orsemi-putrid flesh of any kind. The most general expression for leprosy is a semi-putrid or toxic character of animal food, just as for the allied pellagra, it is a semi-putrid or toxic character of the bread or porridge. Moreover it is that noxious or unnatural thing in the food, not once and again, or as abonne bouche, but somewhat steadily from day to day as a chief part of the sustenance, and from year to year. As the rain-drops wear the stones, so the poison in the daily diet tells upon the constitution. Once more, such special causes may be present in a country generally, among the poor of all the towns, villages and hamlets, and yet only one person here and there may show specific effects that are recognisable as a disease to which we give a name. Unless there be present the aiding and abetting things, the special factor will hardly make itself felt; and if there be not the special factor, there may be some othermorbus miseriaebut there will not be that one. These aiding things are for the most part the usual concomitants of poverty and hardships, wearing out the nerves far more than is commonly supposed and producing in ordinary an excessive amount of nervous affections among the poor. But among the poor themselves, as well as among the well-to-do, there are special susceptibilities in individuals and in families. One person may have the same unwholesome surroundings as another and the same poisonous element in his diet, but he may fall into no such train of symptoms as his leprous neighbour because he is not formed in quite the same way, because he has “no nerves,” or is of a hardier stock, or because his unwholesome manner of life comes out in some other form of disease (scrofula perhaps, less probably gout), or for some other reason deeply hidden in his ancestry and his personal peculiarities. The chances would be always largely against that particular combination of factors needed to make leprosy. It was amorbus miseriaeof the Middle Ages, but on the whole not a very common one; and it was easily shaken off by the national life when the conditions changed ever so little. It was all the more easily shaken off by reason of the facilities for divorce, the prohibition of marriage, and the monastic discipline.
The staple diet as a cause of leprosy was suspected in the Middle Ages, and by writers as ancient as Galen. It is not withoutsignificance that the minute directions for the dieting of the lepers in the rich hospital of Sherburn, near Durham, urge special caution as to the freshness of the fish: when fresh fish was not to be had, red herrings might be substituted, but only if they were well cured, not putrid nor corrupt. Those directions were in accordance with the best medical teaching of the time on the dietetics of leprosy, or on how to prevent leprosy, as it is given with considerable minuteness in Gordonio and Gilbert[209].
On the other hand we find a singular ordinance of the Scots Parliament at Scone in 1386, or some forty years after the date of the Durham regulations: “Gif ony man brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sall be taken by the Bailie and incontinent without ony question sall be sent to the lepper-folke; and gif there be na lepper-folke, they sall be destroyed alluterlie[210].” Nothing could be more significant for the prevalence and persistence of leprosy in Scotland[211]. Putrid fish and pork did actually come to market; the dangers of them as regarded the production of leprosy were unsuspected; and the lepers (genuine or mistaken) were actually directed to be fed with them. Such food for “lepers” could only have fed the disease; and if it be the case that genuine leprosy was met with in Edinburgh and Glasgow more than two centuries after it ceased to be heard of in England, we need be at no loss to assign the reason why the disease was more inveterate in the one country than in the other.
THE BLACK DEATH.
The most likely of the fourteenth-century English annalists to have given us a good account of the Black Death was the historian Ranulphus Higden, author of thePolychronicon, who became a monk of St Werburgh’s abbey at Chester about the beginning of the century, and lived to see the disastrous year of 1349[212]. That part of his history which relates to his own period he brings down year by year to 1348, with less fulness of detail in the later years, as if old age were making him brief. Under the year 1348 he begins the subject of the great mortality, speaks of the incessant rains of the second half of the year from Midsummer to Christmas, refers to the ravages of the plague at Avignon, the then ecclesiastical capital of Christendom, just mentions England and Ireland, and then lets the pen fall from his hand. Higden is believed to have resumed his annals after 1352; but he was then a very old man, and the last entries are unimportant. But the period from 1348 to 1352 is an absolute blank. He comes to the edge of the great subject of that time, as if he had intended to deal with it comprehensively, beginning with a notice of the previous weather, which is by no means irrelevant, and after two or three lines more he breaks off. Most of the monastic chronicles are interrupted at the same point; if there is an entry at all under the year 1349 it is for the most partmerely the words magna mortalitas. The prevailing sense of desolation and despair comes out in the record made by a friar of Kilkenny, who kept a chronicle of passing events, and escaped the fate of his brethren in the convent only long enough to record a few particulars of the great mortality[213]:
“And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till it come—as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have commenced.”
“And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till it come—as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have commenced.”
There is nothing in the English chronicles so directly personal as that, but there are some facts recorded of the mortality in four of them which have contemporary value, or almost contemporary. The best of these accounts, as a piece of history, is that of Henry Knighton, canon of Leicester[214], who acknowledges his indebtedness to Higden’sPolychroniconfor the events down to 1326, but after that date either writes from his own observation or takes his facts from some unknown contemporary source. The next in importance is Geoffrey le Baker[215], a clerk of the abbey of Osney, near Oxford, whose account of the arrival of the Black Death in England has obtained wide currency as copied literally in the 1605 edition ofStow’sAnnals. The third is Robert de Avesbury[216], whoseHistory of Edward III.serves as a chronicle for the city of London more particularly. The fourth is the Malmesbury monk who wrote, about 1367, the chronicle known as theEulogium[217].
From the systematic paragraphs of those writers, and from various other incidental notices, an outline of the progress of the pestilence in England, Scotland and Ireland, may be traced. It entered English soil at a port of Dorsetshire—said in theEulogiumto have been Melcombe (Weymouth)—in the beginning of August, 1348. It is said to have spread rapidly through Dorset, Devon and Somerset, almost stripping those counties of their inhabitants, and to have reached Bristol by the 15th of August. The people of Gloucester in vain tried to keep out the infection by cutting off all intercourse with Bristol; from Gloucester it came to Oxford, and from Oxford to London, reaching the capital at Michaelmas, according to one account, or at All Saints (1st November) according to another. Although the 15th of August is definitely given as the date of its arrival at Bristol from the Dorset coast, it must not be assumed that the infection covered the ground so quickly as that in the rest of its progresses. We have a measure of the rate of its advance south-westward through Devonshire to Cornwall, in a contemporary entry in the register of the Church of Friars Minor at Bodmin[218]: confirming the independent statements that the pestilence entered England at the beginning of August, the register goes on to record that it reached the town of Bodmin shortly before Christmas, and that there died in that town about fifteen hundred persons, as estimated.
The corporation records of Bridport, a town near to the place in Dorset where the infection landed, show that four bailiffs heldoffice, instead of two, in the 23rd of Edward III.,in tempore pestilentiae; the 23rd of Edward III. would begin 25 Jan. 1349, but the municipal year would probably have extended from September 1348, so that Bridport may have had the infection before the end of that year[219]. It seems probable that the smaller towns, and the villages, all over the South-west, had been infected in the end of 1348, but somewhat later than Bristol and Gloucester. The mandate of Ralph, bishop of Bath and Wells, “On confessions in the time of the pestilence,” is dated Wynchelcomb, 4. id. Jan.M.CCC.XLVIII.(10 January, 1349) and it speaks of the contagion spreading everywhere, and of many parish churches and other cures in his diocese being left without curate and priest to visit the sick and administer the sacraments[220].
The autumn of 1348 may be taken, then, as correct for the South-west; and there is no doubt that the infection had been severe enough in London before the end of that year to move the authorities to action.
“Owing to the increasing severity of the sudden plague day by day at Westminster and places adjoining,” Parliament was prorogued on the 1st of January, 1349[221]. There was a further prorogation on the 10th of March, for the reason given that “the pestilence was continuing at Westminster, in the city of London, and in other places, more severely than before” (gravius solito)[222]. This agrees with Avesbury’s statement that the epidemic in London reached a height (in tantum excrevit) after Candlemas, 1349, and that it was over about Pentecost. One of the best proofs of the season and duration of the Black Death in London is got from the number of wills enrolled in the Husting Courtof the city in the successive months. Those who died of the plague leaving wills were, of course, but a small fraction of the whole mortality; but the wills during some eight months of 1349 are ten or fifteen times more numerous than in any other year before or after, excepting perhaps the year of thepestis secunda, 1361. Starting from 3 in November, 1348 (none in December), the probates rise to 18 in January, 1349, 42 in February, 41 in March, none in April (owing to paralysis of business, doubtless), but 121 in May, 31 in June, 51 in July, none in August and September, 18 in October, 27 in November, and then an ordinary average[223]. Thus it would have had a duration of some seven or eight months in the capital, with a curve of increase, maximum intensity, and decrease, just as the great London epidemics of the same disease in the 16th and 17th centuries are known from the weekly bills to have had.
It does not appear to have been felt at all in Norwich and other places in the Eastern Counties until the end of March, 1349, its enormous ravages in that part of England falling mostly in the summer. There is a definite statement that it began at York about the feast of the Ascension, by which time it had almost ceased in London, and that it lasted in the capital of the northern province until the end of July. The infection almost emptied the abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, of its monks, and the abbey lands of their tenants; and the date given in the abbey chronicle is the month of August, 1349. The spring and summer of that year appear to have been the seasons of the great mortality all over England, excepting perhaps in the southern counties where the outbreak began; even at Oxford, which is one of the towns mentioned as on the route of the pestilence from Dorsetshire to London, the mortality is entered under the year 1349, which was also the year of its enormous prevalence among the farmers and peasants on the manor of Winslow, in the county of Bucks.
Its invasion of the mountainous country of Wales (by no means exempt from plague in the 17th century) may have been a season later—anno sequenti, says Le Baker, which may mean either 1349 or 1350. In the Irish annals, the first mention ofthe pestilence is under the year 1348; but it was probably only the rumour of the mortality at Avignon and elsewhere abroad that caused the alarm in Ireland among ecclesiastics and in gatherings of the people. It was first seen on the shores of Dublin Bay, at Howth and Dalkey, and a little farther north on the coast at Drogheda; it raged in Dublin “from the beginning of August until the Nativity[224],” which may mean the year 1348, although the year 1349 is the date given for the great mortality in Ireland in later chronicles.
The experience of Scotland illustrates still farther the slow progression of the plague, and its dependence to some extent upon the season of the year. Two English chroniclers (Le Baker and Knighton) mention that it got among the Scots assembled in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion at the time when the mortality was greatest in the northern counties, the autumn of 1349. But the winter cold must have held it in check as regards the rest of Scotland; for it is clear from Fordoun that its great season in that country generally was the year 1350. Thus the Black Death may be said to have extended over three seasons in the British Islands—a partial season in the south of England in 1348, a great season all over England, in Ireland and in the south of Scotland in 1349, and a late extension to Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350.
This sweeping pestilence was part of a great wave of infection which passed over Europe from the remote East, and of which we shall trace the antecedents in the latter part of this chapter.The type and symptoms of the disease are sufficiently well-known from foreign descriptions—by Guy de Chauliac and Raymond de Chalin, both of Avignon, by Boccaccio, and by the Villani of Florence. It was the bubo-plague, a disease which is known to have existed in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and made its first great incursion from that country into Europe in the reign of Justinian in the year 543 (see Chapter I.). Its second great invasion, but from a new direction, was the Black Death of 1347-9; and from that time it remained domesticated in the soil of Europe for more than three hundred years as “the plague.” The first medical descriptions of it by native British writers are comparatively late. Manuscript treatises or “ordinances” on the plague circulated in England from the reign of Richard II., most of them being copies of a short work of no great value by one John of Burgoyne or John of Bordeaux. There is also extant an English translation in manuscript, assigned to the 14th century (but belonging to the end of it, if not to the 15th), of a really good work on the plague by the bishop of Aarhus, in Denmark, of which I shall have more to say in the next chapter. But none of these give English experience; and the earliest of our 16th century plague-books, by Phaer, is a compilation mostly, if not entirely, from the Danish bishop’s treatise, the latter having been printed in its English form in or near 1480. It is not until we come to the work of Dr Gilbert Skene of Edinburgh, printed in 1568, that we find a treatise on plague showing traces of first-hand observation and reflection. Then follow the essay of Simon Kellwaye on the London plague of 1593, and that of the well-known Elizabethan poet and physician Thomas Lodge, on the plague of 1603. Thus the reign of the plague in Britain was approaching an end before the native medical profession began to write upon it. Its eventful history from its arrival in 1348 down to a comparatively late period has to be constructed from other materials than the records or systematic writings of the faculty.
The type of the Black Death in England is sufficiently indicated by Le Baker, who was probably living at Osney, near Oxford, when the infection began, and indubitably by friar Clyn of Kilkenny. Le Baker mentions theapostemataor swellings indiverse parts, their sudden eruption, and their extreme hardness and dryness, so that hardly any fluid escaped when they were lanced according to the usual method of treating them[225]. He speaks also of a peculiarly fatal form, from which few or none recovered; it was characterised by “small black pustules” on the skin, probably the livid spots or “tokens” which came to be considered the peculiar mark of the plague, and were certainly the index of a malignant type of it, just as the corresponding haemorrhages are in pestilential fever (or typhus) and in yellow fever. The disease, he adds, was swift in doing its work: one day people were in high health and the next day dead and buried. Knighton also says, with special reference to Bristol, that the attack was fatal sometimes within twelve hours, and usually within three days at the most. The treatment, which would have been, according to all subsequent experience, the privilege only of those who could pay for it, would appear to have consisted in lancing the risings or botches in the armpits, neck, or groins; these were the lymph-glands enlarged to the size of a walnut or of a hen’s egg, and of a livid colour,—the most striking and certain of all the plague-signs.
Clyn’s account of the disease, as he saw it at Kilkenny in 1349, is important for including one remarkable symptom on which great importance has been laid as distinctive of the Black Death among the epidemics of bubo-plague, namely haemorrhage from the lungs: “For many died from carbuncles, and boils, and botches which grew on the legs and under the arms; others from passion of the head, as if thrown into a frenzy; others by vomiting blood[226].” It was so contagious, he says, that those who touched the dead, or even the sick, were incontinently infected that they died, and both penitent and confessor were borne together to the same grave. Such was the fear and horror of itthat men scarce dared exercise the offices of pity, namely, to visit the sick and bury the dead. Clyn’s list of symptoms includes all the most prominent features of the plague as we shall find them described for the great epidemics of the Stuart period—the botches in the armpits or groins, the carbuncles, the boils (or blains), and the frenzy or delirium, as well as the special symptom of the great mortality—vomiting of blood.
Of the botch, which was the most striking sign of the plague, the following description, by Woodall (1639), may be introduced here, to supplement the more meagre accounts of the bubo-plague on its first appearance. Woodall had himself suffered from the bubo or botch on two occasions, in its comparatively safe suppurating form; his description relates to the hard, tense, and dry botch, especially mentioned by Le Baker for 1349, and always the index of great malignity:
“But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh, pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh being also inflamed[227].”
“But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh, pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh being also inflamed[227].”
Of this disease, says Le Baker, few of the first rank died, but of the common people an incalculable number, and of the clergy and the cleric class a multitude known to God only. It was mostly the young and strong who were cut off, the aged and weakly being commonly spared. No one dared come near the sick, and the bodies of the dead were shunned. Both Le Baker and Knighton speak of whole villages and hamlets left desolate, and of numbers of houses, both great and small, left empty and falling to ruin. It was not merely one in a house that died, says friar Clyn of Kilkenny, but commonly husband, wife, children and domestics all went the same way of death; the friar himself wrote as oneinter mortuos mortem expectans. Without naming the locality, Avesbury says that in a single day, twenty, forty,sixty or more corpses were buried in the same trench[228]. The stereotyped phrase in the monastic chronicles is that not more than a tenth part of the people were left alive. However, the author of theEulogium, a monk of Malmesbury who brought his history down to 1366, gives a numerical estimate at the other extreme. He says that the plague entered England at Melcumbe, destroyed innumerable people in Dorset, Devon and Somerset, and, having left few alive in Bristol, proceeded northwards, leaving no city, nor town, nor hamlet, nor scarcely a house, in which it did not cut off the greater part of the people, or the whole of them; but he adds, somewhat inconsequently, “so that a fifth part of the men, women and children in all England were consigned to the grave[229].” These are the vague contemporary estimates of the mortality—ranging from nine-tenths to one-fifth of the whole population. It is possible, however, to come much nearer to precision by the systematic use of documents; and in that exercise we shall now proceed, in an order from the more general to the more particular.
There are two State documents the language of which favours the more moderate kind of estimate. In a letter of the king[230], dated 1 December, 1349, or after the epidemic was over, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, ordering them to watch all who took ship for foreign parts so as to arrest the exit of men and money, the preamble or motive is: “Quia non modica pars populi regni nostri Angliae praesenti Pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our kingdom of England is dead of the present pestilence.) The Statute of Labourers, 18 November, 1350, begins: “Quia magna pars populi, et maximé operariorum et servientium jam in ultima pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as a great part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers, is dead in the latepestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans and labourers as these were its special subjects, but themaximé operariorum et servientiummay be fairly taken in a literal sense to mean that the adult and able-bodied of the working class suffered most. One of the contemporary chronicles says that the women and children were sent to take the places of the men in field labour[231]. It is also significant that the “second plague” of 1361 is named by two independent chroniclers thepestis puerorum, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their turn. Thepestis secundawas also notable, both in England and on the Continent, for the numbers of the nobility which it carried off, and in that respect it was contrasted with the Black Death.
Next we come to certain numerical statements as to the mortality of 1349, which have an air of precision. They relate to Leicester, Oxford, Bodmin, Norwich, Yarmouth and London. In Leicester, according to Knighton, who was a canon there at the time or shortly after, the burials from the Black Death were more than 700 in St Margaret’s churchyard, more than 400 in Holy Cross parish (afterwards St Martin’s), more than 380 in St Leonard’s parish, which was a small one, and in the same proportion in the other parishes, which were three or four in number, and none of them so large as the two first named. Knighton’s round numbers for three parishes are not improbable, considering that Leicester was a comparatively populous town at the time of the poll-tax of 1377: the numbers who paid the tax were 2101, which would give, by the usual way of reckoning, a population of 3939. The population of the same three parishes in 1558, or shortly after the period when English towns were described in the statute of 32 Henry VIII. as being much decayed, would have been about 820 in St Margaret’s, 800 in St Martin’s (Holy Cross), and 160 in St Leonard’s[232]. In 1712, when the hosiery industry had been flourishing for thirty years, the population of St Margaret’s was about 1900 and of St Martin’s about 1750, the estimated population of the wholetown having been 6450, or about one-half more than we may assume it to have been in 1349.
In order to realise what the pestilence of 1349 meant to these parishes of Leicester, let us take the actual burials from the parish register of one of them, St Martin’s, in the comparatively mild plague years of 1610 and 1611, a period when the population, as calculated from the annual averages of births and deaths, would have been from 3000 to 3500, probably less, therefore, by some hundreds than it was in the years before the Black Death. In 1610 there were 82 burials in St Martin’s parish, or about twice the average of non-plague years; in 1611 there were 128 burials, or three to four times the annual average[233]. Knighton’s 400 deaths for the same parish in 1349 would mean that the ordinary burials were multiplied about ten times; while his figures for two other parishes would mean a still greater ratio of increase[234].
For Oxford the estimate is not less precise or more moderate. “’Tis reported,” says Anthony Wood, under the year 1349, “that no less than sixteen bodies in one day were carried to one churchyard[235].”
The information for Bodmin, in Cornwall, comes from William of Worcester[236]who read it, about a century after the event, in the register of the Franciscan church in that town. The entry in the register was doubtless made at the time, and as made by Franciscans familiar with burials it deserves some credit for approximate accuracy. The deaths are put down in round numbers at fifteen hundred, which may seem large for Bodmin at that date. But the truth is that the Cornish boroughwas a place of relatively greater importance then than afterwards. In the king’s writ of 1351, for men-at-arms, in which each town was rated on the old basis before the Black Death, Bodmin comes fourteenth in order, being rated at eight men, while such towns as Gloucester, Hereford and Shrewsbury are rated at ten each. It may well have had a population of three or four thousand, of which the numbers said to have died in the great mortality would be less than one-half.
Perhaps the most satisfactory reckoning of the dead from contemporary statements is that which can be made for London. The disease, as we know, reached the capital at Michaelmas or All Souls (1st November), and its prevalence led to a prorogation of Parliament on the 1st of January, and again on the 10th of March, the reason assigned for the farther prorogation being that the pestilence was raginggravius solito—more severely than usual. The winter mortality must have been considerable, although doubtless the season of the year kept it in check, as in all subsequent experience. But there is evidence that three more burying-places became necessary early in the year 1349. One of these, of no great extent, was on the east side of the City, in the part that is now the Minories[237]; and two were on the north side, not far apart. Of the latter, one formerly called Nomansland, in West Smithfield, was also of small extent[238]; but the other was a field of thirteen acres and a rood, which became in the course of years the property of the Carthusians and the site of the Charterhouse (partly covered now by Merchant Taylors School). The larger burial-ground, called Manny’s cemetery after its donor sir Walter Manny, the king’s minister and high admiral, was consecrated by the bishop of London and opened for use at Candlemas, 1349. Now comes in the testimony of Avesbury, the only chronicler of good authority for London in those years. The mortality increased so much, he says (in tantum excrevit), that there were buried in Manny’s cemetery from the feast of thePurification (when it was opened) until Easter more than 200 in a single day (quasi diebus singulis), besides the burials in other cemeteries[239]. The language of the chronicler implies that the burials in the new cemetery rose to a maximum of 200 in a day. The Black Death must have been like the great London plagues of later times in this respect, at least, that it rose to a height, remained at its highest level for some two, three or four weeks, and gradually declined. A maximum of 200 in a day, in the cemetery which would have at that stage received nearly all the dead, would mean a plague-mortality from first to last, or an epidemic curve, not unlike that of the London plague of 1563, for which we have the exact weekly totals[240]: the five successive weeks at the height of that plague (Sept. 3 to Oct. 8) produced mortalities of 1454, 1626, 1372, 1828 and 1262; and the epidemic throughout its whole curve of intensity from June to December caused a mortality of 17,404. If Avesbury’s figures had been at all near the mark, the Black Death in London would have been a twenty-thousand plague, or to make a most liberal allowance for burials in other cemeteries than Manny’s when the epidemic was at its worst, it might have been a thirty-thousand plague. Even at the smaller of those estimates it would have been a much more severe visitation upon the London of Edward III. than the plague with 17,404 deaths was upon the London of the 5th of Elizabeth.
The mortality of London in the Black Death has been usually estimated at a far higher figure than 20,000 or 30,000. There was a brass fixed to a stone monument in the Charterhouse churchyard (Manny’s cemetery), bearing an inscription which was read there both by Stow and Camden. Stow gives the Latin words, of which the following is a translation: “Anno Domini 1349, while the great pestilence was reigning, this cemetery was consecrated, wherein, and within the walls of thepresent monastery, were buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead, besides many more from that time to the present, on whose souls may God have mercy. Amen.” Camden says the number on the brass was forty thousand, but his memory had probably misled him[241]. This has been accepted as if trustworthy, apparently because it was inscribed upon a monument in the cemetery; and it has been argued that if one cemetery received 50,000 corpses in the plague, the other cemeteries and parish churchyards of London would have together received as many more, so that the whole mortality of London would have been 100,000[242].
But that mode of reckoning disregards alike the scrutiny of documents and the probabilities of the case. The inscription bears upon it that it was written subsequent to the erection of the Carthusian monastery, which was not begun until 1371[243]. The round estimate of 50,000 is at least twenty-two years later than the mortality to which it relates, and may easily have been magnified by rumour in the course of transmission. Even if it had contemporary value we should have to take it as the roughest of guesses. The latter objection applies in a measure to Avesbury’s estimate of 200 burials in a day at the height of the epidemic; but clearly it is easier to count correctly up to 200 in a day than to 50,000 in the space of three or four months. On the ground of probability, also, the number of 50,000 in one cemetery (or 100,000 for all London) is wholly incredible. The evidence to be given in the sequel shows that the mortality was about one-half the population. Assuming one-half as the death-rate, that would have brought the whole population of London in the 23rd of Edward III. up to about 200,000—a number hardly exceeded at the accession of James I., after a great expansion which had proceeded visibly in the Elizabethan period under the eyes of citizens like John Stow, had crowded the half-occupied space between the City gates and the bars of the Liberties, and had overflowed into the out-parishes tosuch an extent that proclamations from the year 1580 onwards were thought necessary for its restraint[244].
Hardly any details of the Black Death in London are known, but the few personal facts that we have are significant. Thus, in the charter of incorporation of the Company of Cutlers, granted in 1344, eight persons are named as wardens, and these are stated in a note to have been all dead five years after, that is to say, in the year of the Black Death, 1349, although their deaths are not set down to the plague[245]. Again, in the articles of the Hatters’ Company, which were drawn up only a year before the plague began (Dec. 13, 1347), six persons are named as wardens, and these according to a note of the time were all dead before the 7th of July, 1350[246], the cause of mortality being again unmentioned probably because it was familiar knowledge to those then living. It is known also that four wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company died in the year of the Black Death. These instances show that the plague, on its first arrival, carried off many more of the richer class of citizens than it did in the disastrous epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same is shown by the number of wills, already given. Perhaps the greatest of the victims of plague in London was Bradwardine, “doctor profundus,” the newly-appointed archbishop of Canterbury, who died at Lambeth, with the fatal botch in the armpits, on 26 Aug. 1349, just a week after landing at Dover from Avignon.
The often-quoted figures for Norwich, 57,374 deaths in the city from the pestilence of 1349, are wholly incredible. They are derived from an entry in the borough records in the Gildhall[247]: “In yis yere was swiche a Dethe in Norwic that theredied of ye PestilenceLVIIMilIIICLXXIIIIbesyd Relygius and Beggars.” We should probably come much nearer the truth by reading “XVIIMil.” for “LVIIMil.” It does not appear at what time the entry was made, nor by what computation the numbers were got. Norwich was certainly smaller than London; in the king’s writ of 1351 for men-at-arms, London’s quota is 100, and that of Norwich 60; the next in order being Bristol’s, 20, and Lynn’s, 20. These were probably the old proportions, fixed before the Black Death, and re-issued in 1351 without regard to what had happened meanwhile, and they correspond on the whole to the number of parishes in each city (about 120 in London and 60 in Norwich[248]). Norwich may have had from 25,000 to 30,000 people before the pestilence, but almost certainly not more. The city must have suffered terribly in 1349, for we find, by the returns in the Subsidy Roll showing the amount raised by the poll-tax of 1377 and the numbers in each county and town on whom it was levied, that only 3952 paid the tax in Norwich, whereas 23,314 paid it in London[249]. That is a very different proportion from the 60 to 100, as in the writ for men-at-arms; and the difference is the index of the decline of Norwich down to the year 1377. In that year, the population, by the usual reckoning from the poll-tax, would have been about 7410; and it is conceivable that at least twice that number had died of the plague within the city during the spring and summer of 1349.
The figures given of the mortality at Yarmouth, 7052, are those inscribed upon a document or a brass that once stood in the parish church; it was seen there in the fifteenth century by William of Worcester, a squire of the Fastolf family connected with Yarmouth, who gives the numbers as 7000, giving also the exact dimensions of the great church itself[250]. They are adduced by the burgesses of Yarmouth in a petition of 17 Henry VII.(1502), as follows: “Buried in the parish church and churchyard of the said town 7052 men.” Yarmouth, like Norwich, suffered unusually from the Black Death; in 1377, by the poll-tax reckoning, its population was about 3639. It may be assumed to have lost more than half its people; but it recovered quickly, was made a seat of the wool-staple, and threatened to rival Norwich.
Clyn’s statement that 14,000 died in Dublin from the beginning of August until Christmas may also be taken merely as illustrating the inability of early writers to count correctly up to large numbers.
The most trustworthy figures of mortality in the Black Death which were recorded at the time are those given for the inmates of particular monasteries; and these are such as to give colour to the remark interpolated in Higden’sPolychroniconthat “in some houses of religion, of twenty there were left but twain.”
At St Albans, the abbot Michael died of the common plague at Easter, 1349, one of the first victims in the monastery. The mortality in the house increased daily, until forty-seven monks, “eminent for religion,” and including the prior and sub-prior, were dead, besides those who died in large numbers in the various cells or dependencies of the great religious house[251]. At the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, the visitation was in August, although the epidemic in the city of York was already over by the end of July[252]. The abbot Hugh died at Meaux on the 12th of August, and five other monks were lying unburied the same day. Before the end of August twenty-two monks and six lay-brethren had died, and when the epidemic was over there were only ten monks and lay-brethren left alive out of a total of forty-three monks (including the abbot) and seven lay-brethren. The chronicler adds that the greater part of the tenants on the abbey lands died also[253]. In the Lincolnshire monastery of Croxton, allthe monks died save the abbot and prior[254]. In the hospital of Sandon, Surrey, the master and brethren all died[255].
At Ely 28 monks survived out of 43[256]. In the Irish monasteries the mortality had been equally severe: in the Franciscan convent at Drogheda, 25 friars died; in the corresponding fraternity at Dublin, 23; and in that of Kilkenny 8 down to the 6th of March[257], with probably others (Clyn himself) afterwards.
The following mortalities have been collected for East Anglian religious houses: At Hickling, a religious house in Norfolk, with a prior and nine or ten canons (‘Monasticon’), only one canon survived. At Heveringham in the same county the prior and canons died to a man. At the College of St Mary in the Fields, near Norwich, five of the seven prebendaries died. Of seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk, five lost their prioress as well as an unknown number of nuns[258]. At the nunnery of Great Winthorp on the Hill, near Stamford, all the nuns save one either died of the plague or fled from it, so that the house fell to ruin and the lands were annexed by a convent near it[259].
The experience of Canterbury appears to have been altogether different, and was perhaps exceptional. In a community of some eighty monks only four died of the plague in 1349[260]. It is known, however, that when the new abbot of St Albans halted at Canterbury on his way to Avignon after his election at Easter, one of the two monks who accompanied him was there seized with plague and died[261].
These monastic experiences in England were the same as in other parts of Europe. At Avignon, in 1348, sixty-six Carmelite monks were found lying dead in one monastery, no one outside the walls having heard that the plague was amongst them. In the English College at Avignon the whole of the monks are said to have died[262].
What remains to be said of the death-rate in the great mortality of 1349 is constructive or inferential, and that part of the evidence, not the least valuable of the whole, has been worked out only within a recent period. The enormous thinning of the ranks of the clergy was recorded at the time, in general terms, by Knighton, and the difficulty of supplying the parishes with educated priests is brought to light by various things, including the founding of colleges for their education at Cambridge (Corpus Christi) and at Oxford (Durham College). The first to examine closely the number of vacancies in cures after the great mortality was Blomefield in the third volume of theHistory of Norfolkpublished in 1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a reference to No. IV. of theLib. Instit.), shows 863 institutions to benefices in 1349, “the clergy dying so fast that they were obliged to admit numbers of youths, that had only devoted themselves for clerks by being shaven, to be rectors of parishes[263].” A more precise use of Institution Books, but more to show how zealous the clergy had been in exposing themselves to infection than to ascertain the death-rate, was made (1825) for the archdeaconry of Salop. It was found that twenty-nine new presentations, after death-vacancies, had been made in the single year of 1349, the average number of death vacancies at the time having been three in two years[264]. The first systematic attempt to deduce the mortality of 1349 from the number of benefices vacant through death wasmade in 1865 by Mr Seebohm, by original researches for the diocese of York and by using Blomefield’s collections for the diocese of Norwich[265]. In the archdeaconry of the West Riding there were 96 death vacancies in 1349, leaving only 45 parishes in which the incumbent had survived. In the East Riding 60 incumbents died out of 95 parishes. In the archdeaconry of Nottingham there were deaths of priests in 65 parishes, and 61 survivals. In the diocese of Norwich there were 527 vacancies by death or transfer, while in 272 benefices there was no change. Thus the statement made to the pope by the bishop of Norwich, that two-thirds of the clergy had died in the great mortality is almost exact for his own diocese as well as for the diocese of York. These figures of mortality among the Norfolk clergy were confirmed, with fuller details, by a later writer[266]: the 527 new institutions in the diocese of Norwich fall between the months of March and October—23 before the end of April; 74 in May; 39 from 30th May to 10th June; 100 from 10th June to 4th July; 209 in July; and 82 more to October. According to another enumeration of the same author for East Anglia, upwards of 800 parishes lost their parsons from March 1349 to March 1350, 83 parishes having been twice vacant, and 10 three times.
There is no mistaking the significance of these facts as regards the clergy: some two-thirds of a class composed of adult males in moderate circumstances, and living mostly in country villages, were cut off by the plague in Norfolk and Suffolk, in Yorkshire and Shropshire, and probably all over England. That alone would suffice to show that the virus of the Black Death permeated the soil everywhere, country and townalike. It is this universality of incidence that chiefly distinguishes the Black Death from the later outbreaks of plague, which were more often in towns than in villages or scattered houses, and were seldom in many places in the same year. But there remains to be mentioned, lastly, evidence inferential from another source, which shows that the incidence in the country districts was upon the people at large. That evidence is derived from the rolls of the manor courts.
It was remarked in one of the earliest works (1852) upon the history of an English manor and of its courts, that “the real life or history of a nation is to be gathered from the humble and seemingly trivial records of these petty local courts[267],” and so the researches of the generation following have abundantly proved. Much of this curious learning lies outside the present subject and is unfamiliar to the writer, but some of it intimately concerns us, and a few general remarks appear to be called for.
The manor was the unit of local government as the Normans found it. The lord of the manor and the cultivators of the soil had respectively their rights and duties, with a court to exact them. There are no written records of manor courts extant from a period before the reign of Edward I., when justice began to be administered according to regular forms. But in the year 1279 we find written rolls of a manor court[268]. From the reign of Edward III. these rolls begin to be fairly numerous; for example, there is extant a complete series of them for the manor of Chedzey in Somerset from 1329-30 to 1413-14. The court met twice, thrice, or four times in the year, and the business transacted at each sitting was engrossed by the clerk upon a long roll of parchment. The business related to fines and heriots payable to the lord by the various orders of tenants on various occasions, including changes in tenancy, successions by heirship, death-duties, the marriages of daughters, the births of illegitimate children, the commission of nuisances, poaching, andall matters of petty local government. The first court of the year has usually the longest roll, the parchment being written on one side, perhaps to the length of twenty or twenty-four inches; the margin bears the amount of fines opposite each entry; there are occasionally jury lists where causes had to be tried. Of the community whose business was thus managed a notion may be formed from the instance of the Castle Combe manor[269]: in 1340 it had two open fields, each of about 500 acres, on its hill-slopes, cultivated by 10 freemen tenants, 15 villeins, 11 other bondsmen cultivating a half-acre each; 8 tenants of cottages with crofts, 12 tenants of cottages without crofts, as well as 3 tenants of cottages in Malmesbury.
It will be readily understood that an unusual event such as the great mortality of 1348-49 would leave its mark upon the rolls of the manor courts; the death-vacancies, with their fines and heriots, and all entries relating to changes in tenancy, would be unusually numerous. Accordingly we find in the rolls for that year that there was much to record; at the first glance the parchments are seen to be written within and without, like the roll in the prophet’s vision; and that is perhaps all that the inspection will show unless the student be expert in one of the most difficult of all kinds of ancient handwriting,—most difficult because most full of contractions and conventional forms. But by a few those palaeographic difficulties have been surmounted (doubtless at some cost of expert labour), and the results as regards the great mortality of 1349 have been disclosed.
The manor of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, belonging to the great abbey of St Albans, was a large and typical one[270]. Besides the principal village it had six hamlets. At the manor courts held in 1348-9 no fewer than 153 holdings are entered as changing hands from the deaths of previous holders, the tenancies being either re-granted to the single heir of the deceased or to reversioners, or, in default of such, retained by the lord. Of the 153 deceased tenants, 28 were holders ofvirgates and 14 of half-virgates; or, in other words, there died 42 small farmers, cultivating from forty to fifteen acres each, in half-acre strips scattered all over the common fields of the manor. These 42 held twice as much land as all the remaining 111 together; the latter more numerous class were the crofters, who cultivated one or more half-acre strips: they would include the various small traders, artisans and labourers of the village and its hamlets; while the former class represented “the highest grades of tenants in villenage.”
Of both classes together 153 had died in the great mortality. What proportion that number bore to the whole body of tenants on the manor may be inferred from the following: out of 43 jurymen belonging almost exclusively to the class of larger holders, who had served upon the petty jury in 1346, 1347 and 1348, as many as 27 had died in 1349; so that we may reckon three out of every five adult males to have died in the Winslow district, although it would be erroneous to conclude that the same proportion of adult women had died, or of aged persons, or of infants and young children.
Another more varied body of evidence has been obtained from researches in the rolls of manor courts in East Anglia[271].
In the parish of Hunstanton, in the extreme north of Norfolk, with an area of about 2000 to 2500 acres, 63 men and 15 women had been carried off in two months: in 31 of these instances there were only women and children to succeed, and in 9 of the cases there were no heirs at all; the whole number of tenants of the manor dead in eight months was 172, of whom 74 left no heirs male, and 19 others had no blood relations left to claim the inheritance. The following is the record of the manor court of Cornard Parva, a small parish in Suffolk: on 31st March, 1349, 6 women and 3 men reported dead; on 1st May, 13 men and 2 women, of whom 7 had no heirs; at the next meeting on 3 November, 36 more deaths of tenants, of whom 13 left no heirs. At Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, which could not possibly have had 400 inhabitants, 54 men and 14 women were carried off in sixmonths, 24 of them without anyone to inherit. At the manor court of Croxton, near Thetford, on 24th July, 17 deaths are reported since last court, 8 of these without heirs. At the Raynham court, on the same day, 18 tenements had fallen into the lord’s hands, 8 of them absolutely escheated, and the rest retained until the heir should appear. At other courts, the suits set down for hearing could not be proceeded with owing to the deaths of witnesses (e.g. 11 deaths among 16 witnesses) or of principals. The manor court rolls of Lessingham have an entry, 15th January, 1350, that only thirty shillings of tallage was demanded, “because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence[272].”