The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9)

On the other hand, whilst apparently allowing that about one-half of the population perished, so eminent an authority as the late Professor Thorold Rogers held that the population of England in 1349 could hardly have been greater than two-and-a-half millions, and "probably was not more than two millions."367 The most recent authority, Dr. Cunningham, thinks that "the results (i. e., of an inquiry into the number of the population) which are of a somewhat negative character, may be stated as follows: (i.), that the population was pretty nearly stationary at over two millions from 1377 to the Tudors; (ii.), that circumstances did not favour rapid increase of population between 1350 and 1377; (iii.), that the country was not incapable of sustaining a much larger population in the earlier part of Edward III.'s reign than it could maintain in the time of Henry VI."368 Thus the estimate first given, of the population previous to the Black Death, may be taken as substantially the same as that adopted by Dr. Cunningham. Mr. Thorold Rogers, on the other hand, without entering into the question of figures, views the problem altogether from the standpoint of the land, the cultivated portion of which he considers incapable of supporting a larger population than he names.

In the country at large the most striking and immediate effect of the mortality was to bring about nothing less than a complete social revolution. Everywhere, although the well-to-do people were not exempt from the contagion, it was the poor who were the chief sufferers. "It is well known," wrote the late Professor Thorold Rogers, "that the Black Death, in England at least, spared the rich and took the poor. And no wonder. Living as the peasantry did in close, unclean huts, with no rooms above ground, without windows, artificial light, soap, linen; ignorant of certain vegetables, constrained to live half the year on salt meat; scurvy, leprosy, and other diseases, which are engendered by hard living and the neglect of every sanitary precaution, were endemic among the population.369

The obvious and undoubted effect of the great mortality among the working classes was to put a premium upon the services of those that survived. From all parts of England comes the same cry for workers to gather in the harvests, to till the ground, and to guard the cattle. For years the same demands are re-echoed until the landowners learnt from experience that the old methods of cultivation, and the old tenures of land, had been rendered impossible by the great scourge that had swept over the land.

It was a hard time for the landowners, who up to this had had it, roughly speaking, all their own away. With rents falling to half their value, with thousands of acres of land lying untilled and valueless, with cottages, mills and houses without tenants, and orchards, gardens, and fields waste and desolate, there came a corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Everything that the landowner had to buy rose at once, as Professor Thorold Rogers pointed out, "50, 100, and even 200 per cent." Iron, salt and clothing doubled in value, and fish – and in particular herrings, which formed so considerable a part of the food of that generation – became dear beyond the reach of the multitude. "At that time," writes William Dene, the contemporary monk of Rochester, "there was such a dearth and want of fish that people were obliged to eat meat on the Wednesdays, and a command was issued that four herrings should be sold for a penny. But in Lent there was still such a want of fish that many, who had been wont to live well, had to content themselves with bread and potage."370

Then that which had been specially the scourge of the people at large began to be looked upon as likely to prove a blessing in disguise. The landowner's need was recognised as the labourers' opportunity, upon which they were not slow to seize. Wages everywhere rose to double the previous rate and more. In vain did the King and Council strive to prevent this by legislation, forbidding either the labourer to demand, or the master to pay, more than the previous wage for work done. From the first the Act was inoperative, and the constant repetition of the royal commands, addressed to all parts of the country, as well as the frequent complaints of non-compliance with the regulations, are evidence, even if none other existed, of the futility of the legislation. Even when the King, taking into consideration "that many towns and hamlets, both through the pestilence and other causes, are so impoverished, and that many others are absolutely desolate," granted, if only the money were paid him in three months, that the fines levied on servants and others for demanding excessive wages, and on masters for giving them, might be allowed to go in relief of the tax of a tenth and fifteenth due to him,371 the justices appointed to obtain the money plead that they "cannot and have not been able to levy any of these penalties."372 The truth seems to be that masters generally pleaded the excessive wages they were called upon to pay, as an excuse for not finding money to meet the royal demands, and it was for this reason rather than out of consideration for the pockets of the better classes that Edward issued his proclamations to restrain the rise of wages. But he was quickly forced to understand "that workmen, servants, and labourers publicly disregarded his ordinances" as to wages and payments, and demanded, in spite of them, prices for their services as great as during the pestilence and after it, and even higher. For disobedience to the royal orders regulating wages the King charged his judges to imprison all whom they might find guilty. Even this coercion was found to be no real remedy, but rather a means of aggravating the evil, since districts where his policy was carried out were quickly found to be plunged in greater poverty by the imprisonment of those who could work, and of those who dared to pay the market price for labour.373

Knighton thus describes the situation: – "The King sent into each county of the kingdom orders that harvesters and other workmen should not obtain more than they were wont to have, under penalties laid down in the statute made for the purpose. But labourers were so elated and contentious that they did not pay attention to the command of the King; and if anyone wanted to hire them he was forced to pay them what was asked, and so he had his choice either to lose his harvest and crops, or give in to the proud and covetous desire of the workmen. When this became known to the King, he levied heavy fines upon the abbots, priors, and the higher and lesser lords, as well as upon the greater and smaller landowners in the country, because they had not obeyed his orders, and had given higher wages to their labourers; from some he exacted 100s., from some 40s., and from some 20s., and indeed from each as much as he could be made to pay. And he took from every carucate throughout the whole kingdom 20s. besides a fifteenth.

"Then the King arrested very many labourers and put them in prison; and many fled and hid themselves in forests and woods for the time, and those who were caught were fined more severely still. And the greater number were sworn not to take higher daily wages than was customary, and were so liberated from prison. In like manner he acted towards the artificers in towns and cities."374

To this account of the labour difficulties which followed on the mortality may be added the relation of the Rochester contemporary, William Dene. "So great was the want of labourers and workmen of every art and craft," in those days, he writes, "that a third part and more of the land throughout the entire kingdom remained uncultivated. Labourers and skilled workmen became so rebellious that neither the King, nor the law, nor the justices, the guardians of the law, were able to punish them."375 Many instances are to be found in the public documents at the period of combinations of workmen for the purpose of securing higher wages, and of their refusal to work at the old rate of payment customary before the great mortality had made the services of the survivors more valuable. This, in the language of the statute, is called "the malice of servants in husbandry." In the same way tenants who had survived the visitation refused to pay the old rents and threatened to leave their holdings unless substantial reductions were made by their landlords. Thus, in an instance already given, the landowner remitted a third part of the rent of his tenants, "because they would have gone off and left their holdings empty unless they had obtained this reduction."376

As a consequence of the great mortality among small tenant farmers and the labouring classes generally, and forced by the failure of legislation to practically cope with the "strike" organised by the survivors, the landowners quickly despaired of carrying on the traditional system of cultivation with their own stock under bailiffs. Professor Thorold Rogers has pointed out that "very speedily after the plague, this system of farming by bailiff was discontinued, and that of farming on lease adopted." The difficulty experienced by the tenant of finding capital to work the farms at first led to the institution of the stock and seed lease, which, after lasting till about the close of the fourteenth century, gave place to the ordinary land lease, with, of course, a certain fixity of tenure, which at this day we do not associate with that form of lease. Some landowners tried, with more or less success, to continue the old system; but these formed the exception, and by the beginning of the next century the whole tenure of land had been changed in England by the great mortality of 1349, and by the operation of the "trades unions," which sprung up at once among the survivors, and which are designated, in the statute against them, as "alliances, covines, congregations, chapters, ordinances and oaths."

The people all at once learnt their power, and became masters of the situation, and although for the next thirty years the lords and landowners fought against the complete overthrow of the mediæval system of serfdom, from the year of the great mortality its fall was inevitable, and practical emancipation was finally won by the popular rising of 1381. Even to the last, however, the landowning class appear to have remained in the dark as to the real issues at stake. They claimed the old labour rents, by which their manor lands had been worked, as well as the money payments for which they had been commuted, and they desired that the old ties of the tenant in villainage to the soil of his lord should be maintained. Even Parliament was apparently at fault as to the danger which threatened the established system. It is impossible, however, to read the sermons of the period without seeing how entirely the clergy were with the people in their determination to secure full and entire liberty for themselves and their posterity, and it is probably to their countenance and advice that the preamble of an Act passed in the first year of Richard II. refers when it says: "Villains withdraw their services and customs from their lords, by the comfort and procurement of others, their counsellors, maintainers, and abettors, which have taken hire and profit of the said villains and land tenants, by colour of certain exemplifications made out of Domesday, and affirm that they are discharged and will suffer no distress. Hereupon they gather themselves in great routs, and argue by such a confederacy that everyone shall resist their lords by force."

One result of the change of land tenure should be noticed. Previously to the great plague of 1349 the land was divided up into small tenancies. An instance taken by Professor Rogers of a parish, where every man held a greater or a less amount of land, is a typical example of thousands of manors all over the country. It shows, he says, "how generally the land was distributed," and that the small farms and portions of land, so remarkable in France at the present day, did prevail in England five hundred years ago. A great portion of this land, however, although held by distinct tenants, lay in common, and it is a very general complaint at this period that, as the fields were undivided, they could not be used except by the multitude of tenants, which had been carried off by the great sickness. To render them profitable, under the condition of things consequent upon the new system of farming, these tracts of country had to be divided up by the plantation of hedges, which form now so distinguishing a mark of the English landscape as compared with that of a foreign country.

The population also having by the operation of the great mortality become already detached from the soil, before the final extinction of serfdom, their liberation resulted not, as in other countries, in the establishment of a large class of peasant proprietors, but in that of a small body of large landowners.

Of course, again, such a phrase must not be interpreted in the modern sense, whereby a "landowner" is an "owner" of land in a way which, in those days of custom and perpetuity of tenure, would not have been even understood. The change then effected rendered possible the character of the land settlement that now prevails.

So terrible a mortality cannot but have had its effect and left its traces upon the education, arts, and architecture of the country. In the first, besides the temporary interference with the education at the Universities, "this pestilence forms," write the authors of the History of Shrewsbury, "a remarkable era in the history of our language. Before that time, ever since the Conquest, the nobility and gentry of this country affected to converse in French; children even construed their lessons at school into that language. So, at least, Higden tells us in his Polychronicon. But from the time of 'the first Moreyn,' as Trevisa, his translator, terms it, this 'manner' was 'som del ychaungide.' A school-master, named Cornwall, was the first that introduced English into the instruction of his pupils, and this example was so eagerly followed that by the year 1385, when Trevisa wrote, it had become nearly general. The clergy in all Christian countries are the chief persons by whom the education of youth is conducted, and it is probable that the dreadful scourge of which we have been treating, by carrying off many of those ancient instructors, enabled Mr. Cornwall to work a change in the mode of teaching, which but for that event he would never have been able to effect, and which has operated so mighty a revolution in our national literature."

With regard to architecture, traces of the effects of the great plague are to be seen in many places. In some cases great additions to existing buildings, which had only been partially executed, were put a stop to and never completed. In others they were finished only after a change had been made in the style in vogue when the great mortality swept over the country. Dr. Cox, in his Notes on the Churches of Derbyshire, has remarked upon this. "The awful shock," he says, "thus given to the nation and to Europe at large by the Black Death paralyzed for a time every art and industry. The science of church architecture, then about at its height, was some years recovering from the blow. In some cases, as with the grand church of St. Nicholas, Yarmouth, where a splendid pair of western towers were being erected, the work was stopped and never resumed… The recollection of this great plague often helps to explain the break that the careful eye not unfrequently notes in church buildings of the 14th century, and accounts for the long period over which the works extended. We believe this to be the secret of the long stretch of years that elapsed before the noble church of Tideswell was completed in that century; and it also affords a clue to much other work interrupted, or suddenly undertaken, in several other fabrics of the country."377 To this may be added the fact that the history of stained-glass manufacture shows the same break with the past at this period. Not only just at this time does there appear a gap in the continuity of manufacture, but the first examples after the great pestilence manifest a change in the style which had previously existed.

In estimating the mortality among the clergy it has been already noted that we have, in many instances, more certain data to work upon than in the case of the population at large. In each county the number of institutions to benefices during the plague has already been noticed, and in those cases where the actual figure cannot be ascertained from documentary evidence, half the total number of benefices has, in accordance with the general result where such evidence is available, been taken to represent the livings rendered vacant during that year. From this it would appear that in round figures some 5,000 beneficed clergy fell victims to their duty. As already pointed out this number in reality represents only a portion of the clerical body; and in any estimate of the whole allowance must be made for chaplains, chantry priests, religious, and others.

It is, of course, possible to come to any conclusion as to the proportion of the beneficed to the unbeneficed clergy only by very round numbers. Turning to the Winchester registers, for example, we find that the average number of priests ordained in the three years previous to 1349 was 111.378 The average number of institutions to benefices annually during the same period was only twenty-one, so that these figures taken by themselves seem to show that the proportion of beneficed to unbeneficed clergy was about one to four. On this basis, and assuming the deaths of beneficed clergy to have been about 5,000, the total death roll in the clerical order would be some 25,000.

This number, although very large, can hardly be considered as excessive, when it is remembered that the peculiar nature of their priestly duties rendered them specially liable to infection; whilst in the case of the religious, the mere fact of their living together in community made the spread of the deadly contagion in their ranks a certainty. The Bishops were strangely spared; although it is certain that they did not shrink from their duty, but according to positive evidence remained at their posts. To their case are applicable the lines of the poet upon the like wonderful escape of the Bishop during the plague in the last century at Marseilles: —

"Why drew Marseilles' good Bishop purer breathWhen nature sickened, and each gale was death?"379

On the supposition that five-and-twenty thousand of the clerical body fell victims to the epidemic, and estimating that of the entire population of the country one in every hundred belonged to the clergy, and further that the death rate was about equal in both estates, the total mortality in the country would be some 2,500,000. This total is curiously the same as that estimated from the basis of population returns made at the close of the memorable reign of Edward III., evidencing, namely, a total population, before the outbreak of the epidemic, of some five millions.380

It remains now to briefly point out some of the undoubted effects, which followed from this great disaster, upon the Church. It is obvious that the sudden removal of so large a proportion of the clerical body must have caused a breach in the continuity of the best traditions of ecclesiastical usage and teaching. Absolute necessity, moreover, compelled the Bishops to institute young and inexperienced, if not entirely uneducated clerics, to the vacant livings, and this cannot but have had its effect upon succeeding generations. The Archbishop of York sought and obtained permission from the Pope to ordain at any time, and to dispense with the usual intervals between the sacred orders; – Bishop Bateman, of Norwich, was allowed by Clement VI to dispense with sixty clerks, who were but twenty-one years of age, "though only shavelings," and to allow them to hold rectories, as otherwise the divine offices of the Church would cease altogether in many places of his diocese.

"At that time," writes Knighton, the sub-contemporary canon of Leicester, "there was everywhere such a dearth of priests that many churches were left without the divine offices, mass, matins, vespers, sacraments, and sacramentals. One could hardly get a chaplain to serve a church for less than £10, or 10 marks. And whereas before the pestilence, when there were plenty of priests, anyone could get a chaplain for 5 or even 4 marks, or for 2 marks and his board,381 at this time there was hardly a soul who would accept a vicarage for £20, or 20 marks. In a short time after, however, a large number of those whose wives had died in the pestilence came up to receive orders. Of these many were illiterate and mere laics, except in so far as they knew in a way how to read, although they did not understand" what they read.382

One instance of the rapidity of promotion, so that benefices might not too long remain unfilled, may be given. In the diocese of Winchester the registers record at this period very numerous appointments of clerics, not in sacred orders, to benefices. For example, in 1349 no fewer than 19 incumbents already appointed to churches in the city of Winchester came up for ordination, and eight in the following year. Of these 27 every one took his various orders of sub-deacon, deacon, and priest at successive ordinations without the normal interval between each step in the sacred ministry.383

Two examples of the straits to which the Bishops were reduced for priests are to be found in the registers of the diocese of Bath and Wells. The one is the admission of a man to the first step to Orders, in the lifetime of his wife, she giving her consent, and promising to keep chaste, but not, as was usually required under such circumstances, being compelled to enter the cloister, "because she was aged, and could without suspicion remain in the world."384 The second instance in the same register of a difficulty experienced in filling up vacancies is the case of a permission given to Adam, the rector of Hinton Bluet, to say mass on Sundays and feast days in the chapel of William de Sutton, even although he had before celebrated the solemnities of the mass in his church of Hinton.385

Another curious case, which we may suspect really came from the same cause, is noted at an ordination held in December, 1352, at Ely. Of the four then receiving the priesthood two were monks, and from the other two an oath of obedience to the Bishop and his successors was enacted, together with a promise "that they would serve any parish church to which they might be called."386

Many instances could be given of the ignorance consequent upon the ordinations being hurried on, and upon laymen, otherwise unfitted for the sacred mission, being too hastily admitted to the vacant cures. To take but two instances, from Winchester, which may serve to illustrate this and at the same time to show the zeal with which the mediæval Bishops endeavoured to guard against the evil. On 24th June, 1385, the illustrious William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, caused Sir Roger Dene, Rector of the church of St. Michael, in Jewry Street, Winchester, to swear upon the Holy Gospels that he would learn within twelve months the articles of faith, the cases reserved to the Bishop, the Ten Commandments, the seven works of mercy, the seven mortal sins, the Sacraments of the Church, and the form of administering and conferring them, and also the form of baptizing, etc., as contained in the Constitutions of Archbishop Peckham.387 The same year, on July 2nd, the Bishop exacted from John Corbet, who on the 2nd of June previous had been instituted to the rectory of Bradley, in Hampshire, a similar obligation to learn the same, before the feast of St. Michael then next ensuing. In the former case Roger Dene had been rector of Ryston, in Norfolk, and had been instituted to his living at Winchester by the Bishop of Norwich only on 21st June, 1358, three days before Bishop William of Wykeham required him to enter into the obligation detailed above.388

It has been already remarked that one obvious result of the great mortality, so far as the Church is concerned, was the extraordinary decrease in the number of candidates for sacred orders. In the Winchester diocese, for example, the average number of priests ordained in each of the three years preceding 1349 was 111; whilst in the 15 subsequent years, up to 1365, when Bishop Edyndon died, the yearly average was barely 20; and in the thirty-four years, from 1367 to 1400, even with so zealous a prelate as William of Wykeham presiding over the diocese, the annual average number of ordinations to the sacred priesthood was only 27; a number which was further decreased during the progress of the 15th century.389