The Black Death in London (18 page)

Some personal items were recovered from the dead. From around the ankle of one man was recovered a slender strip of chainmail, possibly the remnant of a hem, or perhaps more likely a decorative item. Providing a more dramatic snapshot in the context of this study were the discoveries of two small coin hoards buried with victims (see Fig. 11). Remarkably both skeletons were identifiable, as adult women, probably between the ages of 26 and 35, and buried in coffins.
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The larger hoard (181 coins) accompanied a woman buried in one of the ash-lined coffins who was probably wearing a belt. The coins were found in two caches broadly divided into silver pennies, which had been stashed in a pouch slung around the neck or under the shoulder, and farthings (with some larger denominations) possibly in a waist pouch. The numismatic evidence of the coins examined indicates a deposit date of between 1344 and 1351.

The smaller hoard, eight silver pennies, had also been kept in some kind of pouch or purse at the waist of the dead woman, and the latest one issued again dated to 1344–51. Together, these coin groups provide our best empirical evidence of the date of the cemetery, but they do a fair bit more than that. The ashy linings of coffins were found in only 2 per cent of all plague burials, so seem not to represent some manner of general disinfectant policy, but rather indicate some other deliberate ritual. In contrast, given the strenuous efforts by the wealthy to ensure through wills that their estate was passed on, and in light of the fact that the burial of money with the dead was extremely rare in medieval England, it seems inconceivable that relatives would deliberately have buried such considerable sums with their owners. The answer probably lies in a combination of haste (represented by the lack of willingness to search and remove the dead woman’s clothing and possessions), and deliberate respect and veneration (represented by the securing of a wooden coffin and the careful application of ash lining to its base before the burial).

Other evidence does suggest the grimmer side of identifying and collecting burials. One skeleton located in a mass trench was found hunched up in a crouched position, evidence perhaps of rigor mortis and thus of a hurried burial. More telling was the state of the bodies in a small mass burial pit dug towards the eastern edge of the western burial plot. Of eight individuals buried in it, five were adult men, two were teenagers, and one could only be described as adult. At least two of this group were partially disarticulated. This might mean that they had been dug up from elsewhere and transferred here, but far more probably their bodies had lain rotting in deserted buildings or in fields near the city for a considerable time before being found by survivors; their presence in a mass grave hints at some co-ordinated effort to recover bodies.

So we know that in this one cemetery more adults were brought for burial than children, and more men than women; they were, most probably, from the poorer end of the social spectrum; coffins were used for over a quarter of the victims, and some of these show signs both of respect and deliberation, while others suggest haste; and finally, bodies may have come for burial within a single day of death as well as some considerable time afterwards.

How the corpses got to the cemetery is unclear – no London documents describe the day-to-day transport of the dead. Some European cities, such as Florence,
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saw the emergence of paid collectors and gravediggers. From the chronicles of others (such as William of Dene, see above), it is clear that the disaster was such that people carried their own dead to the graveside. If Robert of Avesbury’s figures of up to 200 burials daily in West Smithfield are realistic, one has to consider the involvement of some organising authority capable of ensuring that the flow both of victims and of other city traffic did not become choked. The mass trenches at East Smithfield suggest that there was also an organised collection system not unlike the plague carts of the seventeenth-century outbreaks. The most likely route for the transport of corpses to this was either through Aldgate or by river transport to stairs or jetties east of the Tower; the Postern Gate built some fifty years earlier adjacent to the Tower moat may also have been used, but would not have admitted carts.

The second key aspect of the plague upon which archaeology sheds light is the organisation and use of an emergency cemetery over the plague months. The first thing to note is that two areas were used – the western and eastern plots. Each of the two main burial areas were conspicuously well-ordered. They were split into regular rows (twelve in the west, four in the east) and did not intercut to any significant degree. Within these rows, two principal modes of burial were used: individual graves, and larger, mass burial trenches or pits. We cannot tell from the archaeology whether these areas were used simultaneously or whether when one area was completely filled up, the second was opened, and if so, in which order. We can, however, make some intelligent guesses.

The cemetery was founded in the early months of 1349, probably in February, and was therefore established at a time of high mortality but just before the full height of the plague. It was the last of the three emergency cemeteries to be founded, following the Pardon churchyard and the West Smithfield cemetery, and was thus probably accepting burials which for logistical reasons could be made in neither the local parish or monastic graveyards, nor the two West Smithfield cemeteries. So it is probable that from its first day the cemetery was facing a significant inflow of corpses for burial. The nearest site to the entrance was the western zone, and therefore the earliest burials may have been in the westernmost row of this zone. The first three rows were made up entirely of individual graves, and may thus have been used during February prior to the dramatic spike of mortality implied in March by the wills when will-making doubled and probates tripled. If so, the rate of burial in February might have been about ten per day.

The two mass trenches, one forming the fourth row and the other extending along almost the entire eastern boundary of the cemetery field, are compelling evidence of a step-change in burial rate. The larger, eastern trench probably exceeded 115m in length, while the western one measured about 70m. The latter trench might have contained 600 burials, while that to the east probably held 1,000 or more. Assuming that these trenches were the result of the months of heaviest mortality, March and April, this suggests twenty-five to thirty burials daily, or three per hour in daylight. In the city of Hereford, one parishioner remembered seeing up to twenty bodies buried at the parish church of St Peter in a single day, suggesting such a rate might easily have been reached.
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The trenches, about 1.7m deep and 1.9m wide, were both filled very carefully despite the rate at which bodies were supplied. The burials were all set supine in the trench, each body aligned roughly east–west with the head of each corpse laid to the west in accordance with custom (see Fig. 12). Such care shows a particular deliberation even in the face of profound disaster. Each layer of the dead was, exactly as Boccaccio described, covered with a thin capping of soil, and some five layers filled the trenches. There was no archaeological evidence in the two trenches for any ‘batching’, and it is likely that once the lowest layer was partially complete and sealed in each, further burials were laid down on top, proceeding in sequence until the trenches were full. It seems most likely that ropes were used to lower each corpse into place – the bodies were quite clearly not dumped carelessly out of carts. This same care has been seen in the four mass graves believed to be Black Death graves at the Hospital of the Holy Ghost, Lübeck, Germany, where nearly 700 bodies were found to have been carefully laid, west to east and north to south, in three or four overlapping rows and stacked up to five deep.
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Once each mass trench was filled, rows of individual graves followed, six working eastward in the western zone and four working westward along the eastern boundary. These latter four completed the use of the eastern zone. In what precise order the burials took place cannot be ascertained, but there are some clues found in the western zone to suggest that burial may have continued there until the end of the first outbreak and perhaps slightly beyond. Firstly, rows eight and nine saw a reduction in the use of coffins from above 45 per cent to 35 per cent. Then, a third mass trench, 10m long, was dug forming much of the excavated portion of the tenth, western row. Its base stepped up from south to north, suggesting that that was how it was filled, and it held a minimum of fifty corpses.

The distribution of men, women and children was no different from what had gone before, but only two coffins were recorded, both of children under the age of 10 years. Furthermore, the corpse of a teenager had been placed face down, probably accidentally. This trench stopped short of the northern end of the grave row; the last section was occupied by a sizeable grave pit which contained the remains of eight corpses – five men, two teenagers and an unidentified adult. What sets this group aside is the fact that at least three of them were disarticulated before being buried, indicating that they had probably decomposed before burial. It is possible that by this time, the cemetery was being used to bury corpses lost or dumped in the panic of the main outbreak. The last two rows in the western zone were fragmentary, containing five scattered burials each, suggestive of a tail-off of burial activity. An adult in one of these had been buried face down. This is just one interpretation of the evidence and cannot be corroborated; nevertheless, it fits the available facts. It provides a graphic illustration of the manner in which the citizens dealt with the awful physical reality of the disaster, and it brings us, literally, face to face with just a few of the thousands who were slaughtered by the plague in less than six months.

London could not have been alone in identifying such emergency cemeteries, but surprisingly the evidence for other English towns is rather meagre. At Newark, the Archbishop of York authorised the vicar there to buy a piece of land outside the north gate on account of the pressure on burial space. In other towns, parts of existing hospital or monastery cemeteries seem to have sufficed, such as at Worcester, where the cemetery of the hospital of St Oswald, to the north of the city, was pressed into service to supply the deficiency of the cathedral.
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One curiosity in London is that a huge cemetery already existed outside the walls at St Mary Spital, one of London’s largest hospitals. It had functioned as an emergency cemetery a century earlier and again in the great famine of 1315–21, but while a considerable number (1,392) of individual burials of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were excavated,
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and while mass burial pits were found dating to the twelfth, mid-thirteenth and fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, no such pits were found which could be ascribed to the major fourteenth-century plague outbreaks in London. Unless these have been destroyed by later development, it would appear that the cemeteries at West and East Smithfield were sufficient to manage any superabundance of burials, allowing the hospital to provide single graves for victims that were its responsibility.

The Death Toll

How many thousands died? In London, previous estimates vary, but are worth recounting. Philip Ziegler considered the sum to be about 20–30,000; Naphy and Spicer report estimates between 12,500 and 25,000. Using a novel means of calculation involving known duration and population size, Olea and Christakos considered it reasonable that 50,000 may have died (based on a pre-plague population of 100,000 and assuming a twelve-month duration).
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We might, in addition, recognise that other historians have entertained the notion of a death toll of 50 per cent or greater in the city,
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without placing a number to the dead. These estimates have been made without the benefit of the detailed evidence presented earlier and a closer approximation can now be attempted.

There are a number of ways into this question. The first is to look at the ratio of wills made during the plague months in comparison with those made in the years preceding the disease. Rates of will-making demonstrate the citizens’ expectation of dying, and, given that large numbers of the wills were probably made at the first sign of infection, it should bear some relevance to the actuality of the mortality. The total of 392 wills drawn up in the nine months from November 1348 to the end of July 1349 (equivalent to a total of 523 wills for a full year), is nineteen times greater than the annual rate of will-making for the twenty years from 1327 prior to the plague. This measure of the expectation of mortality is essentially a measure of the concern of citizens. It might be argued that many more people drew up wills than actually had to, out of fear of a sudden death. This can be checked against the evidence from the other end of the process – the will enrolments of those who definitely did die. Among all those Husting will-makers who encountered the plague and either lived or died, the following categories include:

– Those who made their wills before the outbreak and whose wills were enrolled after its conclusion (n = 16)

– Those who made their wills before the outbreak and whose wills were enrolled during the epidemic months (n = 32)

– Those who made their wills during the epidemic months and whose wills were also enrolled during the epidemic (n = 275)