The Black Death

The Great Pestilence or ‘Black Death’ of the 1340s has traditionally been identified with the disease today known as Bubonic Plague or ‘Yersinia pestis’, named after the Swiss bacteriologist, Alexandre Yersin, who in 1894 first isolated the plague bacillus during an outbreak in Hong Kong. The disease itself travels via animal hosts, especially rats, the ultimate agent (or ‘vector’) of transmission being fleas whose digestive tracts become congested with plague bacilli, exciting the fleas into a frenzy of biting and repeated vomiting in their attempts to ingest blood, thereby spreading infected blood, and hence the disease itself, all the more speedily from one flea-bitten victim to another. The fleas themselves travel in the fur of rats, and can on occasion survive, even without an animal host, in the grain or grain debris which is the rat’s preferred environment. Symptoms of infection amongst humans include painfully sensitive ‘buboes’ or swellings, varying from the size of a pea to that of an egg, generally located in the lymph nodes nearest to the point of infection, most often in the groin or armpits, although sometimes in the neck or behind the ears. Infection occurs as, or more, easily in villages and the countryside than it does in towns, perhaps because the ratio of rats to humans in a village is higher than would be the case in urban areas with a denser population of humans.

There are problems in identifying the Black Death as Yersinia pestis. Diseases, like people, change over time. The pathology of bubonic plague as experienced in China or India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will not necessarily assist us towards an understanding of plague in the 1340s. Although fourteenth-century writers describe symptoms, including the painful buboes, that seem consistent with plague, there are other features to the disease – its apparent failure to observe the seasonal life-cycle of the plague flea, the speed both of its distribution and the resulting mortality – which suggest that some other cause should be sought, a pneumonic form of plague perhaps, anthrax, influenza or some other pestilence that may itself have died out or mutated to such a degree that it can no longer be identified with any particular modern virus or bacterium. None of this should be allowed to detract either from the terror of the Black Death or the human suffering that it caused.

To a human population already weakened by the famine and disease that had characterized the period after 1315, living on the thin edge between starvation and survival, the pestilence of 1348–9 brought disaster on a unprecedented scale. From Weymouth the pestilence spread to the West Country, reaching Bristol by August 1348. Probably via multiple points of entry, it infected East Anglia and by the autumn was threatening London. Its causes – a great rain of worms and serpents in China? A foul miasma spread through the air? God’s vengeance? – were as poorly understood as the precautions that might be taken against it. The English had never liked foreigners. In an essentially rural society of villages and villagers, in which everyone knew everyone else’s business, Christ’s injunctions to feed the hungry and shelter the stranger (Matthew 25:35) were answered as much in the breach as the observance. There had always been a tension between the urge to charity towards groups such as lepers, and the law’s insistence that other outcast communities be hunted down and destroyed. Now, in the 1340s, townsfolk in places such as Gloucester tried vainly to stem the progress of pestilence by closing their gates to outsiders. The attempt, needless to say, proved merely that death knows no bounds.

The actual rate of mortality from the plague will never be known. The evidence upon which we rely here, chiefly manorial court records and bishops’ registers, tells us only about the death rates amongst certain sorts of priests and peasants. But did all priests seek to bring comfort to the sick, in which case we might extrapolate statistics from the number of priests recorded as dying, or did they instead send auxiliaries, in which case the records will supply no reliable gauge? Three archbishops of Canterbury in succession died during the course of 1348–9, two of them certainly from the pestilence. Of the forty-two monks and seven lay brothers at Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire, thirty-two are said to have died. Plague killed all of the friars living in the house of Our Lady at Norwich, and only three of the twenty-six monks of Newenham in Devon survived. Yet at Canterbury Cathedral, out of a community of more than a hundred monks, there were only four deaths. How are we to extrapolate national trends from such figures?

Modern estimates suggest that anything between a third and two-thirds of the population died as a result of the outbreak of 1348–9, but there is an enormous difference here between the upper and lower ends of this range, and it would be unsafe merely to opt for a median figure of fifty per cent. The poor, infants, the old and those least likely to find a place in the surviving records will clearly have died in greater numbers than the rich and the well-fed, or those able to run for their lives, as appears to have been the case for the King, who throughout the winter of 1349–50 assiduously avoided London, spending Christmas at Otford in Kent, and then moving by easy stages to Woodstock. Any attempt to convene Parliament was abandoned. Even then, the King did not entirely escape the disease which seems to have caused the death of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Joan, at Bordeaux in September 1348. Another of the King’s children, William of Windsor, apparently born in 1348, seems to have died in infancy, perhaps again as a result of pestilence. Even so, no earls died of the plague, and in 1348 the death rate amongst the peerage seems to have run at less than one in twenty, lower than in an average year, rising only to one in eight in 1349.

So great are the possibilities here for statistical analysis, number-crunching and the reduction of human history to a series of graphs and diagrams, that social and economic historians have gone wild in their pursuit of plague as a factor in England’s history. The Black Death has been presented as the wellspring of virtually everything that happened thereafter: social unrest provoked by a labour shortage, followed by rising wages, followed by a transformation in rural society; increased legal regulation and the rise of the modern ‘state’, as kings, from Edward III onwards, issued legislation intended to freeze social relations in their pre-plague state, to guarantee deference to the great and servility amongst the many, coercing every group within society, from bishops to blacksmiths, to stand by their obligations one to another; an upsurge in piety, as humanity petitioned God to remove the scourge of plague, or alternatively a rise in anticlericalism, as men cursed God and his ministers for their failure to prevent the pestilence; the encouragement of such phenomena as prostitution previously regarded as sins, as young men were encouraged to procreate to relieve the population shortage; a recourse to increasing extremes in war and pleasure, as life was counted cheap and to be lived to the full before the inevitable snuffing out; growing fatalism and a fascination with death and decay, seen, for example, in the ‘transi’ tombs of fifteenth-century England, in which bishops such as Richard Fleming at Lincoln or Henry Chichele at Canterbury were shown both robed and magnificent in life, and rotted and cadaverous in death; or a rising tide of optimism and a determination to master nature via medicine and science, leading not just to the rediscovery but to the surpassing of classical knowledge, and hence to the origins of the European Renaissance. Virtually everything, black or white, positive or negative, can and has been traced back from the fifteenth century to the pestilence of the 1340s.