History of England 1-6

Whether it meant as much to the English people is open to doubt. The war against the French represented a quarrel between two monarchs, who were members of the same family and who both spoke French as their native language. What had the affairs of princes to do with the condition of England? The people had in any case far more serious matters with which to deal when, in 1348, all the forces of infection and death were unleashed in an epidemic without parallel.

It was named as ‘the pestilence time’. The disease itself was called ‘the plague’ or ‘the Black Death’. It may not have been bubonic plague, however; it has been variously described as anthrax or influenza or a form of haemorrhagic fever. It may have been a disease that no longer exists. Contrary to popular superstition it is unlikely to have been carried by rats.

It came out of Central Asia in the early 1330s and then spread throughout the known world by means of the trade routes. It had reached Italy by 1347 and, in the summer of the following year, touched Bristol and other ports. By the autumn of 1348 it had reached London before travelling north. It manifested itself in buboes, ulcerated swellings in the groin or armpit; a contemporary described a bubo as in ‘the form of an apple, or the head of an onion … it seethes like a burning cinder, and is of the colour of ash’. In some cases the body erupted in abscesses filled with pus. This was accompanied by aching limbs, vomiting and diarrhoea; the victims were generally dead within three days.

They were buried in mass graves, laid side by side in long trenches, the adults carrying their dead children on their shoulders. An old belief still persists that the parts of certain graveyards must never be disturbed for fear of ‘letting out the plague’. It is not completely without justification; the spores of anthrax can survive for hundreds of years. The cemeteries of London were soon filled, and 13 acres (5.2 hectares) of land were purchased on the borders of Smithfield to be converted into a vast graveyard. One third, or even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.

It is likely that, before the plague, the country had been overpopulated; it may even be that malnutrition actively hastened the fatalities. So on some form of Malthusian calculation the distemper freed the energies of the surviving population and increased the availability of resources. It did not seem like this at the time. According to Henry Knighton, a chronicler of the period, ‘many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of people; likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there; and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited’. Men could not be found to work the land, so women and children were obliged to drive the plough. In a school textbook of the next generation there is a set sentence, ‘The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday.’ Ruined buildings were a familiar hazard.

A Franciscan friar, John Clyn, left an account of the period. ‘Lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time’, he wrote,

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 grasp of the wicked one – myself awaiting death among the dead [inter mortuos mortem expectans] as I have truly heard and examined, so I have 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 may survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence.

He added, some time later, two words – ‘magna karistia’ or ‘great dearth’. Then another hand followed. ‘Here it seems that the author died.’

The plague was generally considered to be an act of God, punishing sinners for their pride and presumption, their vanity and faithlessness. It represented an evil so great that, according to William Langland in Piers Plowman, ‘prayers have no power to prevent this pestilence’. Langland also stated that the southwest wind, blowing in the evening, was a baleful sign. It was the breath of the devil. It was said that all those born after the arrival of the pestilence had two fewer teeth than those born before. In 1361 the pestilence time returned. It was known as ‘the mortality of children’. A third epidemic followed in 1369, and a fourth in 1374. It was noticed at the time that the wealthier classes were not so severely affected as the rest of the population; they were not forced into close or intimate contact with the sick.