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

Shortly after this, on January 14, 1353, Bishop Edyndon ordered a similar inquiry to be made as to the state of Christchurch priory, which was also heavily in debt.³⁴² That the house had been seriously diminished in members seems more than probable in view of the fact that from the date of the plague till the beginning of 1366 no subject of the house was ordained priest.

The hospital of Sandown, in Surrey, was left, as before said, without a single inmate. On June 1, 1349, the Bishop, in giving it into the care of a priest named William de Coleton, says: "Since all and everyone of the brethren of the Hospital of the blessed Mary Magdalene of Sandown, in our diocese, to whom on a vacancy of the office of Prior, or guardian, the election belonged, are dead in the mortality of men raging in the kingdom of England, none of the brethren being left, the said hospital is destitute both of head and members."³⁴³

The same state of financial ruin is known to have existed in the case of Shireborne priory. On 8th June, 1350, Bishop Edyndon wrote to the abbot and convent of St. Vigor of Cérisy saying that Shireborne, which was said to be a dependency of the abbey, was fallen into great poverty. "The oblations of sacrifices had ceased, and from very hunger the devotion of priests was grown tepid; the buildings were falling to ruins, and its fruitful fields, now that the labourers were carried off, were barren." The priory could not hope, he considered, to recover "in their days," and so, with the consent of the patron, he requested the abbot to recall four of the monks to the abbey, the priory then containing the superior and seven religious. The same day a letter was sent to the prior of Shireborne directing that this should be at once carried out.³⁴⁴

One fact will be sufficient to show the state to which the diocese was reduced after the plague had passed. On the 9th of April, 1350, the Bishop issued a general admonition to his clergy as to residence on their cures. It had been reported to him, he says, that some priests, to whom the cure of souls had been committed, "neglecting, with danger to many souls," this charge, "have most shamefully absented themselves for their churches," so that "even the divine sacrifices," for which these churches had been built and adorned, "had been left off." The sacred buildings were, he says, "left to birds and beasts," and they neither kept the church in repair nor repaired what was falling to ruins, "on which account the general state of the churches is one of ruin." He consequently orders all priests to return to their cures within a month, or to get proper and fitting substitutes.³⁴⁵

In the June of the same year (1350) a special monition was issued to William Elyot, rector of a church near Basingstoke, at once to return to his living, as the church had been left without service. A month later, on the 10th of July, 1350, the Bishop published a joint letter of the Archbishop and Bishops ordering priests to serve the churches at the previous stipends, and he adds that every parish church must be contented with one chaplain only, "until those parish and prebendal churches and chapels which are now, or may hereafter be, unserved, be properly supplied with chaplains."³⁴⁶

There are many indications of the misery and suffering to which the people generally were reduced in these parts. Thus, for example, the King, whose compassion and tenderness, by the way, are very rarely manifested, remits the tax of the 15th due to him in the case of his tenants in the Isle of Wight. This he does, "taking into account the divers burdens which" these tenants have borne, "for the men and tenants of our manors now dead and whose lands and tenements by their deaths have come into our hands."³⁴⁷ A glance at the institutions to benefices in the island will show that at one time or another during the prevalence of the plague nearly every living became vacant, and some more than once.

The town of Portsmouth, also, was forced to plead poverty, and ask the remission of a tax of £12 12s. 2d., because "by the attacks of our enemies the French, fires, and other adverse chances the inhabitants were very much depressed."³⁴⁸ That the "other adverse chances" refers to the desolation caused by the pestilence appears from another grant, of relief for eight years, made to the town the previous year, because it was so impoverished "both by the pestilence and by the burning and destruction of the place by our enemies."³⁴⁹

The neighbouring island of Hayling was in even a worse plight after the pestilence. "The inhabitants of Stoke, Eaststoke, Northwood, Southwood, Mengham, Weston, and Hayling, in the island of Hayling, have shown to us," says the King, in 1352, "that they are greatly impoverished by expenses and burdens for the defence of the said island against the attacks of the French, and by the great wasting of their lands by inroad of the sea, as well as by the abandonment of the island by some who were wont to bear the burdens of the said island. Those consequently who are left would have to pay more than double the usual tax were it now levied. Moreover since the greatest part of the said population died whilst the plague was raging, now, through the dearth of servants and labourers, the inhabitants are oppressed and daily are falling most miserably into greater poverty. Taking into account all this, the King orders the collector of taxes for Southampton not to require the old amount, but to be content with only £6 15s. 7–1/4d.³⁵⁰ Three years later Hayling priory, which as one of the alien houses then in the King's hands had been paying a large rent into the royal exchequer in place of sending it over to their foreign mother house, was relieved by the King of the payment of £57, as it was "much oppressed in these days."³⁵¹

Even in Winchester difficulties as to taxation, at this time, led to many people leaving the city. Citizens, as the document relating to it declares, who have long lived there, "because of the taxation and other burdens now pressing on them, are leaving the said city with the property they have made in the place, so as not to contribute to the said taxes. And they, betaking themselves to other localities in the county, are leaving the said city desolate and without inhabitants to our (i. e., the King's) great hurt."³⁵²

An Inquisitio post mortem for a Hampshire manor, taken in 1350, shows the fall in prices of lands and produce after the mortality. Eighty acres of arable land, which in normal times had been let for two marks (13s. 4d.), now produced only 6s. 8d., or just one-half, being at the rent of 1d. per acre in place of two pence. The same fall is to be seen in the rent of meadow land, which let now at 6d. instead of a shilling, and in the value of woods, 20 acres fetching only 20d., in the place of double that amount, which it used to produce.³⁵³

In Surrey it is the same story. In the inquiry made as to the lands of William de Hastings, on the 12th March, 1349, it is declared that the tenements let on the manor produce only thirty-six shillings because all the tenants but ten are dead, "and the other houses stand and remain empty for want of tenants, and so are of no value this year." In another case a watermill is held by the jury to be worthless because "all the tenants who used it were dead." It had remained empty and no one could be found to rent it. Of the land 300 acres cannot be let. The court of the manor produced nothing, because all are dead, and there are no receipts from the free tenants, which used to amount to £6 a year, "because almost all the tenants on the said manor are dead, and their tenements remain empty for want of some to rent them."³⁵⁴

In the absence of any definite information about the institutions of clergy in the county of Gloucester, it may be roughly estimated, from the number of benefices, that between 160 and 170 beneficed clergy in this district perished in the epidemic. Like other religious houses, the abbey of Winchcombe was impoverished by the consequences of the great mortality, and some years after it was unable to support its community and meet its liabilities. "By defect in past administration," as the document puts it, "it is burdened with great debt, and its state, from various causes, is so miserably impoverished that it is necessary to place the custody of the temporalities in the hands of a commission" appointed by the crown.³⁵⁵

That this is no exaggerated view of the difficulties which beset the landed proprietors at the time, and that the origin of the misery must be sought for in the great pestilence, a passage in Smyth's Lives of the Berkeleys may help to show: – "In the 23rd of this King," he writes, "so great was the plague within this lord's manor of Hame (in Gloucestershire) that so many workfolks as amounted to 1,144 days' work were hired to gather in the corn of that manor alone, as by their deaths fell into the lord's hands, or else were forsaken by them."³⁵⁶

The priory of Lanthony, near Gloucester, was brought to such straits that the community were forced to apply to the Bishop of Hereford to grant them one of the benefices in his diocese. They have been, they say, so situated on the high road as to be obliged to give great hospitality at all times to rich and poor. Their property, in great part, was in Ireland, and it had been much diminished in value by the state of the country. The house was at this time, October 15th, 1351, so impoverished by this and by a great fire that, without aid, they could not keep up their charity. For "the rents of the priory and the services, which the tenants and natives, or serfs of the said house living on their domain, have been wont yearly, and even daily, to pay and perform for the religious serving God there, now, through the pestilence and unwonted mortality by which the people of the kingdom of England have been afflicted, and, as is known, almost blotted out, are for the greater part irreparably lost."³⁵⁷

Some few years after the plague had passed an inquisition held at Gloucester as to the state of the priory of Horsleigh reveals the fact that a great number of the tenants on the estate had died. Horsleigh was at the period a cell of the priory of Bruton, in Somerset, and the question before the jury at this inquiry was as to the dilapidations caused by the prior or minister of the dependent cell. They first found that all revenues from the estates at Horsleigh, after a reasonable amount had been allowed for the support of the prior and his brethren living in the cell, should be paid to the head house of Bruton. This the then prior, one Henry de Lyle, had not done. He had, moreover, dissipated the goods of his house by cutting down timber and underwood and selling cattle. Amongst the rest he is declared to have sold "eighty oxen and cows which had come to the house as mortuaries or heriots of tenants who had died in the great pestilence."³⁵⁸

Dugdale, in his history of the county, prints some 175 lists of incumbents of Warwickshire livings. In 76 cases there is noted a change at this period, and in several instances more than once is a new incumbent appointed to a living within a short period, so that in all there are some 93 institutions recorded.

A glimpse of the state to which the county generally was reduced is afforded by some Inquisitiones post mortem. As soon after the plague as 1350, at Wappenbury in Warwickshire, three houses, three cottages, and 20 acres of land are described as valueless and lying vacant, because of the pestilence late past. At Alcester, on the estate of a man who died June 20th, 1349, rents are not received and tenements are in hand, "for the most part, through the death of the holders." Again, at Wilmacott, an inquiry was held as to the property of Elizabeth, daughter of John de Wyncote, who died 10th August, 1349. It is declared that the mother died on 10th June, and the daughter two months later, whilst the great part of the land is in the hand of the owner "by the death of the tenants in this present pestilence."³⁵⁹

On the estate of one who died in December, 1350, it is certified that there used to be nine villains, each farming half a virgate of land, for which they paid eight shillings a year. Five of these had died, and their land since had been lying idle and uncultivated. On another portion of the same two out of four tenants, who had six acres of land each, have been carried off.

On the manor of Whitchurch, owned by Margaret de la Beche, who died in the October of the plague year, 1349, it is noted that there are no court fees, as all the tenements are in hand. And in May, 1351, of another Oxfordshire estate it is said that eight claimants out of eighteen were dead, and no one was forthcoming to take the land; whilst on the same, out of six native tenants, who had each paid 14 shillings, three are gone, and their land has since remained untilled.³⁶⁰

One or two examples may be given of the difficulties subsequently experienced by the religious houses. The year after the plague had passed the Cistercian abbey of Bruerne was forced to seek the King's protection against the royal provisors and the quartering of royal servants upon them. This Edward granted, "because it was in such a bad state, that otherwise in a short time there would follow the total destruction of the said abbey, and the dispersal of the monks."³⁶¹ Even this protection, however, did not entirely mend matters, for three years later, "to avoid total ruin," the custody of the abbey was handed over to three commissioners."³⁶²

St. Frideswide's, Oxford, was in much the same case. In May, 1349, as we may suppose from the death of the superior during the time of the epidemic at Oxford, the plague had visited the monastery, and had, in all probability, carried off many of its inmates. The deaths of many of its tenants, moreover, must have gravely affected its financial condition, and three years later it was found necessary to put the temporalities in the hands of a commission. "By want of good government," it is said, "and through casual misfortunes, coming upon the said priory, both because of the debts by which it is much embarrassed, and for other causes," it is reduced to such a state that it might easily lead to the dispersal of the canons and the total destruction of the house.³⁶³

Of the tenants of one manor belonging to a religious house in the county of Oxford, it is said "that in the time of the mortality of men or the pestilence, which was in the year 1349, there hardly remained two tenants on the said manor. These would have left had not brother Nicholas de Lipton, then abbot, made new agreements with these and other incoming tenants."³⁶⁴

To take but two instances more in other parts of England.

The year after the plague was over, in 1351, the abbey of Barlings had to plead poverty and to beg for the remission of a tax. It is true, they urge the building of their new church, but likewise declare that they have been "impoverished by many other causes." An Inquisitio post mortem gives the same picture. Two carucates of land, for example, brought in only forty shillings, on account of the pestilence and general poverty and deaths of the tenants. "For a similar reason," a mill, which used to produce £2 in rent, now yields nothing; and so on throughout every particular of the large estate.

In this part of the country, too, the King's officer experienced the greatest difficulties in getting his dues, and the Escheator pleads, in mitigation of a small return, that during the whole of 1350 tenements have been standing empty, in Gayton, near Towcester, in Weedon, in Weston, and in Morton, ten miles from Brackley, as tenants cannot be found "by reason of the mortality." He further excuses himself for not levying on the lands and goods of the people "on account of the pestilence."³⁶⁵

CHAPTER X.
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT MORTALITY

It will be evident to all who have followed the summary of the history of the epidemic of 1349, given in the preceding chapters, that throughout England the mortality must have been very great. Those who, having examined the records themselves, have the best right to form an opinion, are practically unanimous in considering that the disease swept away fully one-half of the entire population of England and Wales.

But whilst it is easy enough to state in general terms the proportion of the entire population which probably perished in the epidemic, any attempt to give even approximate numbers is attended with the greatest difficulty and can hardly be satisfactory. At present we do not possess data sufficient to enable us to form the basis of any calculation worthy of the name. From the Subsidy Roll of 1377 – or some 27 years after the great mortality – it has been estimated that the population at the close of the reign of Edward III. was about 2,350,000 in England and Wales. The intervening years were marked by several more or less severe outbreaks of Eastern plague; and one year, 1361, would have been accounted most calamitous had not the memory of the fatal year 1349 somewhat overshadowed it. At the same time the French war continued to tax the strength of the country and levy its tithe upon the lives of Englishmen. It may consequently be believed that the losses during the thirty years which followed the plague of 1349 would be sufficient to prevent any actual increase of the population, and that somewhere about two and a half millions of people were left in the country after the epidemic had ceased. If this be so, it is probable that previously to the mortality the entire population of the country consisted of from four to five millions, half of whom perished in the fatal year.³⁶⁶

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.