The Black Death (22 page)

On the debit side there was a substantial drop in rents; either because the tenants were dead or because conditions were so
difficult
that all or part of the rent was remitted by the landlord. But, as on most of the manors of the Bishop, labour services were more important than a money rent. So great was the surplus of labour in Farnham immediately before the Black Death that it proved relatively easy to fill the vacancies and get in the harvest without much recourse to specially hired workmen. The three traditional harvest dinners were given for the twenty-four
customary
workers at a total cost of nine shillings, a figure very similar to that for earlier seasons. In the year in which the Black Death was at its worst, total receipts at Farnham were
£
305; total expenses only
£
43 5s.1¼d.

If this had been the whole story, then Farnham would have had cause to congratulate itself. But though the plague
diminished
in virulence it was still active. Between September 1349 and September 1350 another 101 head tenants died. By now the dwindling of the population must have meant that the ratio
between
householder and dependant also diminished but at least another three hundred villagers died. By the end of 1350,
especially
as a few further cases of plague occurred even in the last months of that year, more than a third of the people of
Farnham
must have been dead. Forty times in that year it was said that no fine was paid because there was nobody left to inherit. This meant that the cottage and land escheated to the lord; a situation which was profitable enough for the landlord in
normal
times when there were plenty of spare villeins to take up the tenement but disastrous when all the putative tenants were in their graves. The income from fines fell to
£
36 15s. 10d. and only four heriots were delivered, presumably remitted through charity or because the landlord had too many cattle already. By the end of 1349, fifty-two holdings were lying derelict.
Thirty-six
of these were filled up rapidly but the remainder proved more difficult. An increased amount of work on the demesne, particularly at harvest time, had to be done by hired labour and wages rose sharply in 1349 and 1350. With the virtual closure of the potters ‘and brick makers’ industry in the
neighbourhood,
sales of clay and fern fell away to nothing. But even in this year the reeve could still show a reasonable profit on his operations.

It took some years to get things back to normal. Considerable pressure had to be brought on tenants to take up the vacant
holdings
but in the end all of them were filled. Wages never returned to the 1348 figure, but they soon fell below the inflated level of 1350. A market for clay and fern gradually reopened. Good
administration;
the support of a rich and powerful landlord and the natural wealth of the land, ensured that the hundred of
Farnham
,
like the greater part of the Bishop’s estates, was never a liability. In spite of the death of every third inhabitant, life and business went on much as before. In this Farnham was no more typical of England as a whole than the many manors already mentioned where the economy collapsed and income fell away to almost nothing. But its resilience was far from being unique or even exceptional. It is important to remember that both kinds of manors existed when seeking to establish a picture of England under the Black Death.

A
ND
so the Black Death lapped at the gates of London.
Compared
with Paris, Vienna, Bruges or Constantinople, London may not have seemed so enormous a metropolis; certainly in architecture, painting and general grace of living Venice and Florence were far ahead. But it was still by a long way the most important commercial and industrial centre of England; three times, at least, as large as its nearest rival. Westminster, just
outside
the city walls, was the seat of government and of the King.

London seems to have grown more rapidly and more
consistently
than any of its rivals. Though the city was not included in the Domesday Book, at that time it probably had some fifteen or sixteen thousand inhabitants. By early in the thirteenth
century,
Professor Russell calculated, this figure must have doubled and, by 1348, doubled again to a population of some sixty thousand within the city wall.
1
The immediately outlying villages, integrated with the city in many ways and certainly part of the same unit from the point of view of the spread of the plague, must have added another ten or fifteen thousand to the total.

It would be inappropriate, in a book of this scope, to attempt any profound or detailed analysis of day-to-day life in a medieval city. Nevertheless there is much about the state of London, as for that matter about Paris or Florence, which is directly relevant to any study of the plague, since there were certain built-in
features
in the Londoner’s pattern of life which contributed directly to its successful spread. Perhaps the most relevant of these was the overcrowding. Privacy was not a concept close to the heart of medieval man and even in the grandest castle life was conducted in a perpetual crowd. Hoccleve writes of an earl and countess, their daughter and their daughter’s governess who all slept in the same room. It would not be in the least surprising to know that they slept in the same bed as well if, indeed, there was a bed. In
the houses of the poor, where beds were an unheard of luxury, it would not have been exceptional to find a dozen people sleeping on the floor of the same room. In the country villages, indeed in many urban houses as well, pigs and chickens and perhaps even ponies, cows and sheep, would share the common residence. Even if people had realized that such a step was desirable it would have been physically impossible to isolate the sick. The surprise is not how many households were totally wiped out but, rather, in how many cases some at least of the inhabitants survived.

The dirt and inadequate sanitation of these hovels was, strictly speaking, less relevant to the spread of the Black Death. No one was going to become infected with bubonic plague by drinking tainted water or breathing foetid air. But, equally, it is true that the plague found its work easier in bodies weakened by
dysentery
, diarrhoea or the thousand natural shocks that the unclean body is particularly heir to. Still more important; warmth and dirt provide the ideal environment for the rat. The eventual
victory
of the brown rat over the plague-bearing black rat was in part due to the physical superiority of the former, but, at least as important, was a tribute to the rise in the standard of living and the substitution of brick for clay and wood which deprived the black rat of his sustenance and favourite way of life. The medieval house might have been built to specifications approved by a rodent council as eminently suitable for the rat’s enjoyment of a healthy and care-free life.

What one might call the cinematic image of a medieval town is well known. Lanes barely wide enough to allow two ponies to pass meander between the steep walls of houses which grow
together
at the top, so as almost to blot out the light of day. The lanes themselves – they seem indeed more drains than lanes – are deep in mud and filth; no doubt to be attributed to the myriad buxom servant-wenches who appear at the upper windows and empty chamber pots filled with excrement on the passers-by. No street corner is without the body of a dead donkey and a beggar exhibiting his gruesome sores and deformities to the charitable citizens. Clearly one is in a society where hygiene counts for nothing and no town council would waste its time supervising the cleaning of streets or the emptying of cesspools.

The picture, though of course over-drawn, is not entirely false. A medieval city, by modern standards, would seem a pretty filthy and smelly spot. But it would be unfair to suggest that citizens and rulers were indifferent to the nuisance or did nothing to
remedy
it. Thanks to the researches of Mr E. L. Sabine
2
and others, we now know much about conditions in London and the
activities
of the mayor, aldermen and common council. Though London, as the largest city of England, had the most serious
problems
, so also it had the greatest resources with which to deal with them. The overall picture of London’s filth or cleanliness will be more or less valid for most of England’s towns and cities.

Sanitary equipment, it need hardly be said, was scarce and primitive. In monasteries or castles, ‘garderobes’ were relatively common. Since 1307, the Palace of Westminster boasted a pipe between the king’s lavatory and the main sewer which had been installed to carry away the filth from the royal kitchen. But this was probably unique in London; usually the privies of the
aristocrats
jutted out over the Thames so that their excrement would fall directly in the river or splash down the face of the castle wall. The situation was worse when the privies projected, not over a free flowing river but above a shallow stream or ditch. An inquest into the state of the Fleet Prison Ditch in 1355 revealed that, though it should have been ten feet wide and deep enough to float a boat laden with a tun of wine, it was choked by the filth from eleven latrines and three sewers. So deep was the
resultant
sludge that no water from Fleet Stream was flowing around the prison moat.

Occasionally citizens tried to dispose of their filth by piping it into the common drain in the centre of the street. A more
ingenious
technique was exposed at an Assize of Nuisances in 1347, when it was found that two men had been piping their ordure into the cellar of a neighbour. This ploy was not detected until the neighbour’s cellar began to overflow.

Normally those fortunate enough to possess a private latrine would also have their own cesspool. In theory these had to be built to certain minimum standards; placed at least two and a half feet from a neighbour’s land if they were stone-lined and three and a half feet if they were not. But there were many cases
of seepage into adjoining properties and the contamination of private or public wells. Nor were these the only perils inherent in a cesspool, as the unfortunate Richard the Raker discovered when he vanished through the rotten planks of his latrine and drowned monstrously in his own excrement. Most blocks of tenement houses had their own privies though this was not invariable. But even where such facilities were lacking the chances were that there would be a public latrine not too far away.

Though sewers and cesspools were perhaps the most important of the common council’s responsibilities, they provided by no means the only field in which the authorities saw reason to
intervene
. The three city butcheries of St Nicholas Shambles near Friars Minors in Newgate, the Stocks Market near Walbrook and East Cheap were subject to strict regulations. The years just
before
the Black Death, when cattle murrain was rife in the South of England, gave rise to many such prosecutions for selling meat described as ‘putrid, rotten, stinking and abominable to the
human
race’. Offenders ran the risk of being placed in a pillory and having the putrid meat burnt underneath them.

The disposal of offal and other refuse was a serious problem. At the time of the Black Death the butchers of St Nicholas Shambles had been assigned a spot at Seacoal Lane near the Fleet prison where they could clean carcases and dispose of the entrails. But, under pressure from the Prior of St John of Jerusalem, the site was moved and subsequently moved again, to a choice of Stratford or Knightsbridge; both suitably remote spots outside the city wall. ‘Because’, as the royal instruction read,

The final solution was to build a house on a pier above the Thames and dump the offal directly in the river during the ebb tide.

Even with such precautions the state of the streets was far from satisfactory. The tenement buildings, in which each storey projected two or three feet beyond the one below, seemed
designed
for the emptying of slops, garbage and soiled rushes into the street. The gutters, which ran down the centre of the
narrower
streets and both sides of the wider ones, were generally inadequate to carry away the litter, augmented as it was by the dung of the innumerable domestic animals which lived in the centre of the city. The open sewers which ran down to the river were better able to manage the load but even these were often blocked and inadequate, especially in times of drought, to clear away all that was put in them.

To deal with these problems the common council appointed a number of ‘scavengers’ with instructions to ‘remove all filth, and to take distresses, or else fourpence, from those who placed them there, the same being removed at their cost’. By 1345 the penalty for defiling a street had risen to two shillings and every householder was deemed responsible for a mess outside his house
unless
he could prove his innocence. At least one city raker was appointed for each ward and there seem to have been between forty and fifty carts and horses. The householders, knowing that they would be the ones to suffer if a street was allowed to grow filthy, could generally be relied on to support the efforts of the authorities. Sometimes, indeed, their aid seemed over-enthusiastic as when a pedlar threw some eel skins to the ground in St
Mary-le
-Bow and was killed in the resultant struggle.

But though refuse might have been removed with some
efficiency
from the city centre, too often the system subsequently broke down. Large dumps were established on the banks of the Thames and the adjoining lanes. In 1344 the situation had
become
so bad, especially around Walbrook, Fleet Stream and the city ditch, that a comprehensive survey of all the lanes was
ordered
. But though there was some improvement it does not seem to have lasted long. Thirteen years later the King was
complaining
bitterly that his progresses along the Thames were being disturbed by the ‘dung, lay-stalls and other filth’ which were piled up along the bank.
4

The overall picture, therefore, is of a city squalid and insauitary
enough but aware of its deficiencies and doing its best, though with altogether inadequate tools, to put things right. The records reveal many cases of behaviour in wanton defiance of the rules of hygiene but the very fact that such behaviour was
commented
on and sometimes prosecuted shows that the picturesque excesses, so dear to the heart of the antiquarian, were not
permitted
to flourish unchecked. A responsible city council and a population on the whole aware of its civic duties did quite a good job of keeping London clean.

But the Black Death proved altogether too much for the
public
health services. In 1349 the King wrote to the mayor to
remonstrate
about filth being thrown from the houses so that ‘the streets and lanes through which people had to pass were foul with human faeces and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing, especially in this time of infectious disease’. The mayor was helpless. Not only had many of the
efficient
cleaners died or deserted their post and the machinery for the enforcement of the law been strained beyond its capacities but also the technical problem of transporting something over twenty thousand corpses to the burial grounds had imposed an extra and unexpected burden on the skeleton force which remained. Even ten years later the service was far from normal; in the year of the Black Death itself the most lurid imaginings of a romantic novelist would hardly have done justice to reality.

*

There are so many different routes by which the Black Death could have arrived in London that it would be pointless even to speculate from whence it came. By the end of September 1348 the Prior of Canterbury had addressed an alarmed mandate to the Bishop of London on the incursions which the plague was making in the latter’s diocese,
5
but it does not follow from this that infection was already within the city. Nevertheless it seems certain that the city was affected before the greater part of the surrounding countryside and that there were cases as early as November 1348, and perhaps sooner still. But the main force of the epidemic was not felt until the beginning of the following year.
6

Spring, though any generalization about the plague has many
exceptions, was usually one of the less dangerous seasons for
outbreaks
of bubonic plague.
7
Both from the histories of subsequent epidemics in London and from the evidence which survives of the Black Death itself it seems likely that, from January to March, a strain of pulmonary plague predominated but that the pure bubonic plague came into its own with the warm weather in the late spring and summer. As always in a large community, the disease lasted longer and consumed more gradually than in a small town or village. Deaths were still common till far on into 1350 and, though the full fury of the epidemic lasted only three or four months, almost two years passed between the Black Death’s arrival and the final casualties.