The Black Death (29 page)

‘In the year 1350,’ he wrote,

This all-too familiar description could have applied as well to any other country. Androw of Wyntoun,
21
who was
contemporaneous
with John of Fordun but certainly never read the latter’s chronicles, confirms that Scotland suffered severelv.
22

Finally, the Book of Pluscarden,
23
a slightly later chronicle but
still written dose enough to the date of the plague to have some ring of authenticity, also refers to a third of the population being slain and to the poor suffering far worse than the rich.

‘They were attacked with inflammation and lingered barely four and twenty hours,’ noted the anonymous author,
concluding
more hopefully: ‘The sovereign remedy is to pay vows to St Sebastian, as appears more clearly in the legend of his life.’

The most striking feature of these accounts is the reiterated statement that a third of the population perished. This is a
conservative
figure compared with the speculation of the chroniclers of other countries whose estimates of the mortality might be anything between fifty and ninety per cent, or even on occasion the entire population. It is perhaps to be expected that the
medieval
statisticians of Scotland would approach their task with a sobriety not to be found in the English or the still more volatile Latins but, even so, it seems unlikely that they can be acquitted entirely of exaggeration. Unless their estimates were very far out of line with those of other countries the figure of a third must have been substantially too high. If this is so, then Scotland must have escaped more lightly than England or Wales.

The emphasis given to the virtual immunity of the rich and powerful is also interesting. Everywhere it was the poor who suffered worst and, generally speaking, the more eminent the
individual’s
position, the greater his chances of survival. To take only one example: 18 per cent of the English bishops died as against some 40 per cent of all beneficed clergy. But it was by no means unusual for the great to perish; there are innumerable cases of noblemen or merchants, living in large and spacious houses, who met the same fate as their less prosperous
neighbours.
Clearly such cases cannot have been unknown in Scotland but John of Fordun’s emphatic statement that ‘the meaner sort and common people’ were above all the victims suggests that the discrepancy was even more marked north of the Tweed.

With lower overall mortality and relatively trivial losses among the nobility and upper levels of society it is less surprising that the plague should have left so light a scar in Scotland. It does not seem, however, to have disturbed the balance of power between England and Scotland, though the failure of the English
to win the lasting success which had seemed to be made possible by the rout of the Scots at Neville’s Cross and the capture of King David, can perhaps in part be blamed on the shortage of man-power which resulted from the plague. At all events, the appetite of the Scots for plunder and revenge was temporarily checked and it was several years before they recovered their full zest for forays across the border.

Though cases of the plague occurred north of the border in the autumn of 1349, it seems to have been largely held in check by the Scottish winter. This can, to some extent, be ascribed to the reluctance of rats to change their residence in intense cold but winter does not seem to have been much of an impediment to the advance of the Black Death in other countries. Whatever the reason, the lull was short-lived. In the spring of 1350 the plague was on the move again and quickly blanketed the whole country. By the end of that year all Britain had been infected; all Europe, indeed, since the countries to the north were ravaged at much the same time. In the whole continent, with the
exception
of a few lucky pockets, hardly a village was left unscathed, hardly an individual can have escaped without the loss of at least one friend or relative. It was a continent in mourning. Millions of fresh graves provided a visible memorial but it was not only the dead who paid the price. To survive the Black Death was not to survive unscathed. Indeed, in some ways, the shock which it inflicted on the minds of men seemed even more significant than the fearful harvest which it had reaped among their bodies.

S
TATISTICS
alone cannot provide an adequate picture of the Black Death. That 48.6 per cent of the beneficed clergy in a given diocese died between April and September 1349 is an imposing but somewhat flavourless concept which, in itself, gives no very vivid impression of the sufferings of the people. That a quarter, a third or even half the population died as well is more striking, but the figures still convey no proper idea of what so brutal a
depopulation
meant to those who survived. In every country the great majority of those who lived and those who died were
village
dwellers, dependent on agriculture for their existence.

The academic historian rightly distrusts, even if he does not despise, the work of imaginative reconstruction produced by the historical novelist. A
fortiori,
there must be excellent reason to justify the introduction into a book of this kind of any detail which lacks some sort of documentary evidence. But if the effect of the Black Death is really to be understood then it must be studied at work in a small village community and some attempt be made to evoke the atmosphere which it created and which it left behind it. Not enough is known about any one village to make this possible, but, by piecing together scraps of
authenticated
material, it is possible to construct a coherent picture which, in essence, is plausible and valid. Only by such an exercise can one hope to put flesh on the dry statistical bones provided by the records of the period.

The village of Blakwater, then, is imaginary; that is to say it is not to be found on any map and was unknown to the compilers of the Domesday Survey. But in its organization and its composition it is not in the least a work of imagination; on the contrary it is very ordinary, and every feature could be
duplicated
in many hundreds of similar villages scattered over the face of England. It is perhaps a little richer and better run than most
and it has for this reason been endowed with a poorer neighbour, Preston Stautney, which is decidedly worse off than the average village of the county. Together these two villages present a
reasonably
accurate picture of a rural community of the open or ‘champion’ country in the south of England around the middle of the fourteenth century.

Blakwater, then, was a medium sized village of some thirty families and a total population of about a hundred and fifty. Four of these families belonged to freemen paying rent to the lord of the manor but owing him no feudal service, other villagers were still all bound to the lord and had to do various works on his land in exchange for their cottages and strips of field. It did not seem likely that this would change rapidly since the landlord was William Edendon, Bishop of Winchester, and the Bishop, like most of his colleagues, was decidedly conservative in his attitude towards his tenants. He accepted that the commutation of labour services for money had already gone a long way in the English countryside and that – a point which caused him some distress – it was even to be found on his own estates. But he deplored the process, for social more than economic reasons, and it was
well-known
that his villeins would be unusually privileged if they were ever allowed to change their status.

The village lay about eight miles south-west of the King’s road between London and Winchester; a broad river of mud in winter and of choking dust in summer. The traffic along this road was as heavy as on any in England, not of horsemen and
pedestrians
only but also of horse-drawn carriages, some of them, belonging to the families of the great magnates, vast and
sumptuously
decorated. Needless to say, no such carriage, nor indeed any sort of wheeled vehicle, ever found its way down the meandering footpath which led from the highway to Blakwater.
Perhaps
more surprisingly, very few of the villagers ventured any distance in the other direction. Not a single inhabitant of
Blakwater
had been as far as London, let alone to any foreign country. Only half a dozen had reached Winchester; the parson, the steward, the reeve and one or two of the more adventurous villagers. For the rest of the people, it was an expedition to walk even as far as the rickety wooden bridge which spanned the
stream of Blakwater barely half a mile from the edge of the village.

They felt no sense of deprivation. The village was closely knit, introverted and, by and large, content with its condition.
Certainly
it conducted some minor trade with the outside world,
exported
a little wheat and cattle to the market, imported some cloth and the odd manufactured article. But such trade was
conducted
by foreigners from Winchester through the intermediacy of the reeve or steward; so far as the other villagers were
concerned
it seemed to have little or no relevance to their daily life. What happened in the next village, let alone the next county, was a matter, if not of complete indifference, at least of minor and academic importance. It was entertaining to listen to the tales of travellers in the same spirit as, today, one might crowd to hear the words of an astronaut; but only the romantic or the reckless actually want to go to the moon and the inhabitant of Blakwater was no more likely to want to go to London or to Calais.

Beyond Blakwater the track became even worse, winding circuitously over the hill to the little village of Preston Stautney some four miles away. It was inevitable that there should be a certain amount of intercourse between the two communities. The young people met in the woods to play games or to poach the lord’s deer, sometimes they carried their games a little further and two or three of the families were linked by marriage. But on the whole the two villages kept themselves to themselves. There was no bad blood between them but the Blakwater folk tended to think themselves considerably better than their neighbours. For Preston Stautney was poor and small. Its land was nowhere near as fertile but this alone was not enough to explain the
contrast
. Twenty years before, indeed, it had been by no means so marked. But Sir Peter Stautney, the lord of the manor, was something of a wastrel. He liked to spend his time as a soldier on the Continent when he should have been tending his estates at home. Nor was his performance as a soldier likely to win much glory for himself or vicarious satisfaction for his tenants. Once, indeed, he had got himself captured by the French and his steward had had to sell a couple of villages and extract the last possible penny from the others before he could raise the necessary
ransom
. Discouraged by the lord’s indifference the bailiff had grown
slack and was believed to be lining his own pockets at Sir Peter’s
expense.
The villagers took advantage of his idleness but were none the less resentful of what they felt to be his unfair exactions.

Preston Stautney, in short, was an unhappy village. It had dwindled to some fifteen families, a little over sixty inhabitants in all, and several of those who remained were talking of trying their luck elsewhere. It was, of course, against the law for a
villein
thus to desert his master but the bailiff would be unlikely to take any very vigorous steps to recapture the fugitive –
especially
if he had been softened up with a shilling or two in advance – and by the time Sir Peter discovered what had happened the refugee would be far away and beyond discovery. Not that they needed to go very far to be lost to Sir Peter. One of the free
tenants
at Blakwater was known to be an escaped villein from over the hill. He was a good worker and an honest man and the reeve had no intention of handing him back. Even if Sir Peter found out and complained to the Bishop he would not be likely to get much satisfaction.

For William of Edendon was one of the great magnates of the kingdom, attaching little importance to the protests of a
country
knight. More to the point, he was a capable and
conscientious
landlord, always ready to invest some part of his great riches in improving his estates and, though determined to get his due, never harsh or unreasonable in his exactions. He knew Sir Peter as an inefficient absentee, of interest only in that the chaos of his finances might make it possible to snap up one or two of his manors cheaply at some future date. The Bishop had put in the present steward some three years before, paid him well – fifty shillings a year, clothing, stabling for his horse, the use of part of the manor house and a peck of oats each day for his horse – and expected good service in return. The steward was responsible for seven manors in all but Blakwater was one of the largest and the most central and it was there that he had made his home. He came from somewhere the other side of Winchester, for the Bishop believed in putting foreigners in positions of authority on his manors, but he had been accepted by the villagers, if not as one of them, then at least as the next best thing.

On the whole the people of Blakwater thought themselves
fortunate. But though they knew that they were more prosperous and more secure than their neighbours in Preston Stautney, from time to time they hankered wistfully after the greater
freedom
which the instability of the smaller village had incidentally bestowed on its inhabitants. For not only could the men of
Preston
Stautney leave their homes with impunity if they wanted to but the bailiff was always so short of ready money that it was easy, in exchange for a small payment, to get out of almost all the services which they were supposed to perform on the lord’s demesne. Indeed, most of the former villeins had by now commuted all their services for life and worked on what little was left of the demesne only for a money payment. But though their neighbours might boast about their liberty, the Blakwater men were satisfied for most of the time that their own full stomachs and well-built houses made their lot the happier. Only now and then, when their reeve seemed more than usually exigent, did they wonder whether freedom might not after all be worth the price of poverty.

But it was not only in its steward that Blakwater was
fortunate
. The vicar, though not a particularly strong or dynamic character, was a good man; genuinely fond of his flock and
conceiving
it his duty and his pleasure to serve them diligently. It could have been of him that Chaucer wrote:

The reeve, too, was fair and honest. He looked after the day to day administration of the village and understudied for the steward during the latter’s frequent absences. He was one of the villagers, the brother of the thatcher indeed, and had been reeve for more than twenty years. Now he was an old man and he had told the steward that he wanted to retire at the end of the year. In theory his successor would be elected by all the tenants of the village at a Manor Court but in practice the steward and vicar between them made sure that their candidate was the only one to be nominated. The identity of the new reeve was already decided on and known to all the village. It was to be Roger Tyler; descendant of tilers perhaps, but with no knowledge of the trade himself. Instead he was said to be the best handler of cattle in the neighbourhood and a sensible, determined man whose authority would willingly be accepted by the other
villagers.

As befitted one of the richest of the villeins, Roger Tyler lived in a large, three-bayed house with matting on one of the floors and, a feature of rare luxury, a strip of oiled linen-cloth over one of the four windows. With him lived his old and invalid father, his wife, his sister and his four children – three sons, the eldest aged fourteen, and a girl of six. The family lived well, eating meat more often than any other household in the village except that of the steward. Certainly Roger’s standard of living was higher than the parson’s. Eggs were to be had most days, fish at least once a week and cabbages, leeks, onions, peas and beans were all available in season. For the main meal of the day it would be quite usual to eat a vegetable gruel, rye bread, meat and a piece of cheese, washed down with cider or a thin beer made without hops. He had a few fruit trees as well: apples, pears and a
medlar
, and he took a share of the walnuts and chestnuts from the garden of the manor. In winter, of course, things were harder, but there was almost always a piece of salted bacon in the house. Unfortunately salt was so expensive that even Roger Tyler was forced to skimp and the bacon was often rancid and almost
uneatable
long before spring arrived.

Things were different next door where Roger’s widowed aunt lived alone. Roger had tried to persuade her to join his family but
she valued her independence too high. In Chaucer’s words again she was: