CHAPTER XIII
1
IT was not called the Black Death at the time but it was feared as the worst scourge ever to visit the earth. The symptoms mentioned in the scanty records make it clear that it was the bubonic plague or a very close variation. To the terror-stricken people who heard of its appearance, vaguely at first, it was a visitation of God, perhaps even the first manifestation of the end of the world. Men in these days lived in dread of many things, but it was the fear of the second coming which gripped them most firmly; a state of mind which was intensified by the paintings on the walls of so many churches depicting the tortures of the damned.
Rumors reached England first from the Far East. It was said that it started in India and that the visitation had been heralded by strange occurrences on three successive days. On the first day there was a rain of frogs, serpents, and lizards. The second brought thunder and lightning and sheets of fire from the heavens. On the third day there was more fire and a great cloud of heavy, stinking smoke which moved across the earth and blotted out everything. On the fourth day came the plague.
From that time on the people of Europe talked of little else, although there was not as yet any fear that it would reach them. It was conjectured that the terrible visitation was due to an earthquake which opened up graves and filled the air with infection from the uncovered corpses. The tales which white-faced men exchanged in the taverns were all of natural catastrophies. Great winds straight from heaven or hell were sweeping over Asia and carrying the disease with them. There were floods which converted lowlands into swamps from which noxious odors arose.
Then the conjectures, which had been casual before, turned into panic. The plague had come to Europe. Could anything stop it? Would it loose all its wild terrors on country after country?
It first appeared at a port called Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346. This was a busy shipping center and the vessels there hurriedly spread their sails to escape from this terrible visitation which filled the inns and the crowded houses with bodies carrying the black sign. They spread the disease to every port on the Mediterranean. It manifested itself in an earthquake of unexampled fury which shook Greece and Italy. The air became so heavy and noxious that wine spoiled in tight casks, becoming sour and undrinkable. Then the “thick, stinking mist,” which had been described before, advanced over the land and sea and mountain, obscuring everything—the sun, the moon, and the stars. It spread over Italy and the crops wilted and died and the fruit rotted on the trees. There was no food for the poor until in Florence large bake ovens were built from which as many as ninety-four thousand loaves of bread were distributed daily to the starving people.
All of western Europe waited and trembled while this supernatural visitor came closer and closer. A pillar of fire appeared for an hour at sunset over the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. Large meteors were seen in the skies in many countries. A ball of fire was seen over Paris one August evening.
When the plague reached France, the people of England became aware for the first time that it was universal. Word of strange and fearful things came over the water to the island. At Avignon the churchyards could not hold the dead and the Pope consecrated the Rhone so that bodies might be committed to the waters. The French people were said to be adopting strange methods to escape the contagion. Some were wearing small lions carved out of gold. The gates of Paris were erupting with people seeking escape. Only in houses with windows opening to the north could there be safety. The doctors, who were completely in the dark, were advising people to avoid the sun and warm winds. Stay inside, they were saying, and fill the air with the scent of burning juniper and ash and young oak.
But even with France in the grip of this monstrous visitor from the East, the people of England lived in hope. At its narrowest point, the Channel was twenty miles wide, filled with fast and turbulent water and bringing winds which swept strongly westward. How could the contagion spread over this natural barrier, this clean rampart of wind and water?
2
But not the fast-flowing waves of the Channel nor the winds which swept all before them could prevail in the end. There was no cessation of shipping between the island and the mainland, because there was no hint of the strange truth: that there were always rats in the holds of ships and that on the bodies of the rats were black flies which carried the contagion. It might have been a reasonable precaution for the government to stop all shipping from the mainland, and this might have saved England from the Black Death. But of course nothing of the kind was done.
The first indication of trouble came from the port of Melcombe on the Dorsetshire coast in August 1348. A sailor died there after three days of intense suffering, pitching and moaning in a high fever and spitting blood. People who had been near him came down with the disease at once, the foul symptoms repeating themselves and their faces wearing a black mask of death. Sometimes the agony was prolonged to five days, with tumors appearing outwardly on the groin and under the armpits.
There could be no doubt about it. This was the plague. The people of Melcombe began to die by the hundreds. The terror spread with amazing speed, sweeping over Dorset, Devon, and Somerset, reaching Bristol by the middle of the month. Efforts were made to cut the great western port off from adjoining districts, but nothing could check a wave of death carried, seemingly, on the wind. It spread quickly to Oxford. On All Saints’ Day it reached London.
London, of course, was ripe for it. The sanitary conditions there could not have been worse, with people jammed together in little wooden tenements, the streets rank with offal, and swine roaming about at will. The death list mounted so fast that the victims died untended. Those who could get away did so with a haste which filled the roads with galloping horses, and women on couches swung from saddle to saddle. The poor tramped with furious haste, their belongings on their backs. Even members of the priesthood were fleeing, for every report had spoken of the mortality among the clergy. Master Gaddesden, the royal physician, got away with the king’s family to the cool seclusion of Eltham Castle. He would not have remained in London at any cost, for this disease was the most disagreeable of all and the one which could profit a man of medicine nothing. A meeting of Parliament had been set for the summer, but the officials at Westminster, prior to packing up themselves, issued a hasty notice of prorogation.
Before leaving London it became the custom to visit Westminster and go to the south transept, where a painting of St. Christopher, the kindly patron saint of travelers, occupied one wall. Here they would pause and study a promise printed under the painting,Non Morte mala Morietur. With this assurance of immunity from an evil death they would then depart in a less agitated frame of mind. The greatest dread inspired by the plague was the threat of a death so sudden that the last rites could not be administered.
The toll in London grew so high there was soon no space left in cemeteries. A toft of land was obtained near East Smithfield and enclosed with a high wall of stone, and most of the bodies were buried there. Sir Walter Manny, who seems to have been more charitably disposed than most military leaders, bought thirteen acres next to no man’s land, called Spittle Croft. Some reports have it that fifty thousand bodies were buried here in the first year of the plague, but this obviously is an exaggeration. Authorities place the population of London at the time very little above that figure.
The Black Death followed close on the heels of England’s greatest period of prosperity and success. The victory at Crécy had put national prestige on the highest level, the country was rich and the harvests ample. When faced with the likelihood of death, men looked at one another with wonder as well as fear. “What have we done that this punishment is visited on us?” they asked. “Have we allowed ourselves to become so proud that the wrath of God has been aroused?”
The archers had returned after Crécy with their bows on their backs and ropes of flowers around their necks. Proudly they carried the spoils of victory. They knew full well that they had won the great battle and they proclaimed the fact long and loud. So sure had they become of themselves that if Robin Hood were alive (it has never been established that he actually lived) he would have had hundreds of challenges from these new champions of the longbow, and undoubtedly would have lost some of them.
It seemed impossible that the bowmen of Crécy could die like ordinary men. They enjoyed some immunity, in addition, by living in the small villages where the plague was less likely to strike. But this loathsome disease, produced in the reeking slums of the Far East, was no respecter of locale. The stout yeomen living on the edges of cool green glades and by the clear water of streams caught the infection as quickly as other men and the loss among them ran as high as one in two.
In the larger cities, such as Bristol, Oxford, Norwich, and of course London, the victims were buried in layers in deep pits. In Yarmouth the total stood at 7,052. English statistics seem small, nevertheless, when compared with the records in continental cities. In Florence the death total ran as high as 60,000, Venice 100,000, Paris 50,000. In Marseilles 16,000 people died in one month.
The Black Death reached its peak in England in August of the following year. It subsided then but returned with somewhat lessened fury in 1361 and 1368.
There was no escape possible, even by the method of seclusion made famous by Boccaccio. To go to sea seemed the surest way to invite fate, for the contagion spread more quickly aboard ships than anywhere else. It was not uncommon to see along the southern shores of England ships under full sail being driven by the waters of the Channel, tossing about aimlessly and making it clear that all on board had died. They would vanish finally beyond the horizon into the rough embrace of the Atlantic.
3
One of the most astonishing phases of what has been called the Great Emergence (the trend toward modern conditions of living) came about as a result of the Black Death. England, for the first time, began to have labor troubles.
It happened because the population of the island had been cut almost in half. Most of the great landowners had survived, by immuring themselves behind the thick stone walls of their castles, but after 1349 there were not enough laborers to go around. Much of the land remained untilled and crops were not harvested, while untended flocks and herds ran wild. It followed naturally that a competition developed for the services of the yeomen. Wages went higher and higher, but the laborers, finding such things sweet on the tongue, showed little tendency to work at the beck of the once omnipotent landlord. Labor had gained the upper hand, an extraordinary thing to happen in a country which was still feudal by instinct.
This could not continue beyond a brief, a very brief, period. The land magnates were stirred to fury, and in the cities the prominent merchants swore they could not pay such wages as were demanded. They overlooked the fact that whatever advantage the poorer classes had gained was swallowed up in the increased cost of living. Not being organized, the people could not make themselves heard at Westminster.
The solution reached by the government made it very clear that the tendency toward better conditions had not touched the minds of the ruling classes. A royal proclamation was issued making it incumbent on all unemployed to accept work at the wages which had prevailed before the plague. When this failed to have the desired effect, a Statute of Laborers was passed by Parliament which read:
Every man or woman, of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able of body, and within the age of threescore years—and not having of his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken …
This meant that the laborer was in a worse position than he had been for a century at least. While his pay went back to the low levels of previous years, the costs of living remained at the highest peak. The sorriest aspect, however, was that again the agrarian laborer was bound to the land. It was specifically forbidden him to quit the parish where he lived in search of better employment. If he disobeyed, he was regarded as a fugitive and was subject to imprisonment. Later the punishment was raised to branding on the forehead with a hot iron. The free men of England had been reduced again to slavery.
If they had been organized sufficiently to hold meetings of protest in all quarters of the kingdom, they might have compelled some amelioration of this great injustice; but the day of labor unions and parties was far in the future. They lived in smoldering discontent under the conditions which had been forced upon them, growing unhappier with each passing year. This led inevitably to trouble, to the Peasants’ Revolt which occurred in the reign following that of Edward. It was a sanguinary failure from the standpoint of the leaders who died on the gallows. But it opened the way to later reforms.
It is probably incorrect to say that the laboring classes lacked all organization. Delving into the records of the day, one is likely to stumble over certain odd circumstances which suggest that there were stirrings continuously under the surface. These seem to trace back to one man, a friar named John Ball, who had the habit of assembling the people in the market place after they had heard mass, and haranguing them about their wrongs. He was called the Mad Priest by Froissart, but instead he was a man of a fine and high courage and with such an eloquent tongue that no one could hear him without being persuaded to believe. Twice he was thrown into Canterbury Prison by the archbishop, but word of him got about through all the shires by a system of whispers. “The angel of the Lord will open the prison as he did for Peter” and “Be of good cheer for soon the bell will be rungen by John Ball.” It was clear that the men of the soil waited for a signal which was to come from the wandering priest, and this was known and planned for whenever the plowmen got together in secret.
The signal came in time, but that is a story in the future and does not belong here.
The Black Death brought many changes in conditions, mostly for the worse. Farm laborers who refused to accept the hard laws imposed on them formed themselves into bands and lived by waylaying those who passed on the highways. So many priests had died that many churches were closed and people fell easily into immoral ways. The ownership of lands became so involved by death that the number of lawyers increased by leaps and bounds. In one district the number of wills for probate rose from 22 to 222 in a single year.
One circumstance is cited as a great boon. Fecundity in women became most pronounced, and the birth rate began to increase as soon as the Black Death had passed. Twins and even triplets became almost commonplace. Thus, according to medical authorities who had shown a complete ignorance about everything else, did nature find a remedy for the evils of the plague.