Estimates of the Mortality.
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 late pestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans and labourers as these were its special subjects, but the maximé operariorum et servientium may 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 the pestis puerorum, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their turn. The pestis secunda was 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 whole town 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 borough was 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 raging gravius 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 the Purification (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 the present 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 to such 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 there died of ye Pestilence LVII Mil III C LXXIIII besyd Relygius and Beggars.” We should probably come much nearer the truth by reading “XVII Mil.” for “LVII Mil.” 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’s Polychronicon that “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, all the 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 the History of Norfolk published in 1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a reference to No. IV. of the Lib. 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 was made 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 town alike. 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, and all 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 of virgates 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 six months, 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].”
Further research upon the records of the manor courts will doubtless show that the experience of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lancashire was not singular. From the Castle Combe rolls nothing has been extracted as to the mortality in 1348-9, except one entry (Nov. 13, 1357) that a certain tenement was ruinous, having remained in the lord’s hands since the time of the pestilence for want of a purchaser; but it would be unsafe to conclude that this sequestered manor of Wiltshire had not shared the common fate. The accounts of certain manors in Hertfordshire were headed, for thirty years after the Black Death, with a list of those who had vacated tenancies by death in that pestilence[273]. A decayed inscription cut in the stone of the parish church of Ashwell, in the same county, records the great mortality of 1349 and the great tempest in January, 1362[274]. The tenants of the abbey of Meaux, in the Holdernesse division of Yorkshire, were nearly all dead, as well as the monks within the monastery walls. On the manor of Ensham, near Oxford, “there remained hardly two tenants[275].”
The immediate effects of the great mortality were not so striking as might have been supposed. Although it fell upon town and country in one terrific blow, yet some places had recovered from it before others felt it; it was over in Bristol (so far as we know) before it came to a height in London, and nearly over in London before it began in York. The dead were expeditiously buried in trenches; vacancies among the clergy were promptly filled; the manor courts met and transacted business, and had their records engrossed for the most part in the usual clerkly style. So great a dislocation of society naturally gave rise to some irregularities: stripping the dead is reported from one district in Norfolk, fights and quarrels came into court more often than ever in 1349 and 1350, and we read of two women who each had three husbands in as many months[276]. Knighton says that sheep and cattle were left to wander about untended, and that they often perished in ditches by the wayside. A murrain occurred the same year; at one place five thousand sheep died in the pasture and were left to putrefy[277]. The price of a horse fell from forty shillings to half a marc; a fat ox could be bought for four shillings, a cow for twelve pence, a heifer for sixpence, a fat sheep for four pence, a stone of wool for nine pence[278]. On the other hand, when the harvest of 1349 had to be gathered, the price of labour rose enormously. According to Knighton, a reaper got eightpence a day, with his food, and a mower twelvepence. The extant accounts tabulated by Thorold Rogers confirm the contemporary statement: the rates for threshing the harvest of 1349 were those of panic and compulsion, being unparalleled, whether before or after, in the Eastern, Midland and Southern counties; the immediate effect of the scarcity of hands was to nearly double the wages of labour for the time being. Many villeins or bondsmen took the opportunity of escaping to the towns or to distant manors, where they could make their own terms. Of the last kind of incident, probably a very common one, we have an instance recorded[279]: At an inquest, some years after the Black Death, upon sundry manors near Oxford belonging to Christ Church, it was ascertained that, “in the time of the mortality or pestilence, which was in the year 1349, there remained hardly two tenants in the said manor [Ensham], and these had wished to leave, had not brother Nicholas de Upton, then abbot of the said manor, compounded anew with them, as well as with other tenants who came in.”
So far as regards the immediate effects of the great mortality. Its after-effects, felt within a year or two, upon the economics and morals of the country, upon the power of the old governing class, upon the dispersion of industries and the new life of towns, upon the system of farming, upon the development of the legal profession in London, and upon various other things, are a much more intricate and disputable subject, some part of which will be dealt with in the next chapter in connexion with the subsequent history of plague or its domestication upon the soil of England. Many things in England were noted as having happened “sithen the Pestilence,” to quote the stock phrase of the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ and not the least of them was the frequent recurrence of plague, or a prevalence of sickness so steady that the poet compares it to the rain coming in through a leaky roof.
Some historians have doubted whether after all the Black Death made so very much difference to the course of affairs[280]. It is perhaps inevitable that scholars, accustomed to deal only with obvious human causation, should look with some distrust upon the large claims made, in the way of moral and social consequences, for a phenomenon which has been apt to be classed with comets and earthquakes. The sudden thinning of the population may indeed become a subject for economists without any regard to the causation, and irrespectively of the means by which the numbers were reduced; and that has been the only historic interest of the great mortality hitherto. But the operation of pestilence is peculiar; the thinning of the population is not effected as if in the due course of nature; the analogy is closer with a decimating or exterminating war. The invasion of the Black Death was part of the great human drama, just as if a swarming people or a barbarous conqueror had been visibly present in it. If things were moving in the fourteenth century towards a particular issue, as historians find in their retrospect that they were, then the coming of a great plague was part of that movement, organically bound up with the other forces of it, and no more arbitrary than they. Thus it becomes of interest to trace the antecedents of the Black Death before we attempt to follow out its consequences; and it is not the less of interest to do so, that the train of events leads us as far eastwards as the soil of China, and to the incidents that attended the collapse of the greatest government of the Middle Ages, the empire of the Great Khan.