The Black Death in London (30 page)

Civic ordinances and customs can provide a useful snapshot of changing habits and behaviours. Trading standards and controls were already in place in the city long before the advent of the plague, but there certainly seems to have been a transformation in the regulation of the city dress code, which was not governed by wider royal decree. In January 1352 the mayor and aldermen noted that ‘common lewd’ women had ‘of late’ begun to dress themselves in the manner ‘of good and noble dames and damsels of the realm’, and issued an order that neither resident nor visitor of lesser standing should wear any garments trimmed with fur, lined with sandal, buckram or samite, by day or night, in winter or summer, ‘so that all folks, native or strangers, may have knowledge of what rank they are’. Forfeiture of the offending garment and/or prison were the punishments for transgressors.
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Of itself, there seems to be no direct link to pestilence since negative observations about the change in fashion appear prior to 1348, along with dire warnings about the misfortune that would befall such sins of pride; but what is important is that two subsequent chroniclers of the 1360s saw the wearing of indecent clothing as a specific cause for the wrath of God in the form of pestilence, and one Westminster monk, John of Reading, appears to echo Whittington’s sentiments of a lost world order when he emotionally connected these outlandish fashions with a collapse of moral virtue and the readiness with which men and women would now consort with strangers, deflower virgins, and ‘pervert every convention, decency and standard’.
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Sumptuary laws of 1363 enacted into legislation similar controls to those city regulations of 1351, establishing ownership in London (and other towns) of £1,000 or more in goods and chattels to be the equivalent of esquires and gentlemen with £200 worth of land in terms of the dress code.

Women in London were subject to other kinds of control in the later fourteenth century. The pillory, a high wooden platform in Cheapside reached by a ladder upon which stood a frame that constrained the body in an extremely uncomfortable manner, was known to be in use from at least 1310, but the Letter Books and other sources mention only eight examples of its use between that date and the outbreak of plague in 1348. In contrast, no less than seventy-three cases are registered between 1350 and 1400 (59 per cent of all 125 cases identified between 1310 and 1500). Either crime was rife or the detection of cases and their prosecution was much more rigorous. Of these seventy-three cases, sixty-three were men, committed for one or more hours for a range of crimes including deception, impersonation of officials, cheating, theft, selling counterfeit or putrid goods, oath-breaking and prostitution. However, ten cases (13.6 per cent) were women, punished for a similar range of crimes, and of these, nine were sent to a specific type of pillory or punishment structure called the thewe, about which we know very little.

The thewe seems to have been a pillory specifically built for women, or perhaps a form of ducking stool. It is first mentioned in 1364 when Alice de Caustone, an ale-seller, had been caught thickening the bottom of a quart measure with pitch covered with rosemary to defraud buyers.
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The pillory (and presumably thewe) were not simply irritating, stressful and humiliating punishments. A case in 1350 brought against seventeen men and five women for forestalling poultry (selling it before it arrived at the regulated market) made clear that one, previously convicted, would be pilloried while the remaining twenty-one would be let off with prison as it was their first offence. It is clear that the pillory was considered worse than a prison sentence. A specific focus on the punishment of women is also hinted at by the bequest by Thomas Gauder of money to both a house of women and a house of felons at Newgate.
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There is, therefore, a sense that regulation and punishment had become much more of a public focus and that within this new regime, the transgressions of women had been specifically singled out. The influx of many new families as a result of the plague losses, and the perceived transformation of the old order in consequence, may have stimulated this need to establish control.

This attempt to exert controls extended to those who may not have transgressed specific regulations, but who nevertheless appeared guilty of avoiding work and attempting to live by means of charity alone. As far as government was concerned, the need to maintain a cap on earnings and wages had to be met in part by the increase in labour supply, at a time when this was in very short supply. The Ordinance of Labourers, enshrined in statute in 1351, encouraged disapproval of the ‘sturdy beggars’ – the undeserving poor – and subsequent city regulations made it an offence for those who could work to avoid it. Furthermore, those tempted to help them should be dissuaded, even forcefully through penalties of their own.
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The reduction in dole money for major obituaries at Westminster has already been suggested as a result of this change in attitude (see
Chapter 3
), and this shift in emphasis may have triggered a change in the way hospitality, almsgiving and care for the sick manifested itself physically, through the arrangement and architecture of almonries and infirmaries.

The almonry of Westminster Abbey provides an important example of this. From 1290, the almonry was marked as a space separate from the abbey by a ditch and hedge. Principal buildings were visible from Tothill Street to the north and access was relatively uncontrolled. After 1350, the range of shops and houses described earlier, and, significantly, a gatehouse, came to line the street frontages and the space became highly controlled and inward-focused. It has been argued that this was as a result of the monks responding to the new ideology where the focus was shifting (a) to the concept of a deserving poor (and thus by implication exclusion of the undeserving poor), and (b) towards greater emphasis on resident beneficiaries.
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The move towards residential charity is mirrored by a shift in the monastic infirmaries from day care to in-patient care previously described at abbeys such as Westminster,
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another change which can reasonably be ascribed to the effects of the plague. Subdivision of monastic dormitory halls into small, private rooms is well recounted and the process had begun well before 1348, but the plague may well have had a direct hand in similar evolution of the infirmary hall (and indeed the hospital hall). This has been dated generally to the period after 1350,
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supported by archaeological evidence from sites in the London region. At the Augustinian priory of Merton in Surrey, about 6 miles south-west of the city, a very deliberate subdivision of the infirmary hall into partitioned rooms with tiled floors measuring 3.7m by 2.4m has been dated to the 1360s or 1370 s, as has the insertion of timber screens at Waltham Abbey, Essex. At Westminster, documentary and architectural evidence indicates that the new infirmary, begun around 1360 and completed before 1390, provided chambers for all the beds.
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Examination of the care of Westminster monks in the infirmary between 1297–1355 and 1381–1417 may shed light on the timing for this change. Infirmarers’ records show that the custom of providing a pittance to monks visiting the infirmary ceased for day-patients some time between 1354 and 1380. Thereafter, only in-patients received this sum of money: the concept of day-patients appears to have vanished. The time that in-patients spent there changed considerably from that seen before the plague, and indeed from that witnessed in the immediate aftermath. The median duration of in–patients’ spells in the infirmary was twenty-two days in the first half of the fourteenth century, but had dropped to nine days in the second half; while 50 per cent of the spells in the earlier period had lasted between fourteen and sixty-three days, for the later period this had significantly reduced to between six and fourteen days. Treatment was therefore intensified at once by focusing much more on in-patient care, and yet significantly reduced in that those who did require such care were no longer permitted to stay there as long as they once had. Pressure on a vastly reduced convent to keep the abbey going may have been a key factor.
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Such a move away from day care towards more intensive in-patient care may have catalysed redevelopment of the infirmary here and at other monastic houses in London to include separate chambers.

Monasteries and hospitals were not the only sources of charity. Individual gifts and bequests were hugely important in this regard. It is possible to examine the trends in pious and charitable bequests from the Husting wills and to consider the degree to which the concept of the deserving poor was reflected in the gifts left by well-meaning Londoners. Care must be given to the changing character of the wills themselves in the 1340s, but it is clear from a key study of testamentary behaviour that Londoners gave consistently more to the poor as the century progressed, and a high point of giving was in the decade after the first outbreak. This giving often took place at the graveside of the benefactor on the day of their funeral. Each pauper attending the funeral might get ½
d
or 1
d
, but the overall sums could be quite significant: for example, woolmonger Thomas Broun (d. 1357) and Richard de Walsted (d. 1366) both left 20 marks to be distributed in 1
d
lots, thus allowing for up to 3,200 poor people to benefit.

This form of charity was intended even by those caught up in the plague. In 1361 clerk Walter de Kent left 20
s
to be split in ½
d
portions suggesting he hoped 480 paupers would benefit; Hugh Peyntour’s will drawn up in the same year similarly left ½
d
to 1,000 poor men. But former mayor, Richard de Kislingbury, eclipsed even these gifts by leaving £60 to be divided among the poor – at 1d each this would have benefited 14,400 paupers – and 9½ sacks (3,458lb in weight) of wool to be divided as one fleece per pauper. As a fleece may weigh as much as 12lb, this might have provided for 288 paupers.
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We know that this kind of distribution did occur en masse as the wills suggest, since the Coroners’ Rolls recorded the crushing to death in 1332 of fifty-two paupers as a result of crowding at the gate to Blackfriars during the distribution of money from Henry Fingrie’s will.
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Some bequests were more particular, donating money to poor women, poor girls for marriage portions, or to poor widows. This kind of charity was relatively infrequent, appearing in less than
I
per cent of wills before the
pestis secunda.
During and after 1361, this increases to nearly 2 per cent (see Fig. 15). This trend can be complemented by around 10 per cent frequency found in a sample of Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills for Londoners between 1400 and 1530.
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Such a pattern may show that Londoners perceived a diminishing in the marriage prospects of poor girls (nine cases), and, to a lesser extent, a stress on the ability of poor women, especially widows, to survive in the decades of major plague visitations (two cases). This sense of focus is strengthened when one considers that three of the wills were geographically specific. John Longe, a vintner, willed in 1361 money to support the marriage portions of poor girls throughout London; in the fourth outbreak, John Herlawe’s will of October 1375 left money for the relief of the poor women and widows specifically living in Lime Street, rather suggesting that they were there in some numbers; and in 1390 William Trippelow left money to poor men and sick widows in five named city parishes. Such approaches are representative of an increasing focus on particular social groups or even individuals for charitable bequests in the second half of the century, a focus that is likely to represent a response to the plague.

Religious fraternities provided charity for members and their families should times prove hard, and also undertook wider charitable works within the community. Their role in providing some form of safety net for members’ families and dependants in the first plague of 1348–9 has already been discussed, but the popularity of such groups increased significantly throughout the remainder of the fourteenth century, and, it seems clear, in response to successive epidemics. Only five fraternities are known to have existed before 1348, a number which doubled during 1349. Over the next fifty years, a further seventy-four fraternities were established in the city, their popularity witnessed by a major increase in the number of testators at the court of Husting who bequeathed goods and money to them.
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As a percentage of the overall number of Husting wills, individuals making such bequests rose steadily from 4.8 per cent in the decade immediately after the first outbreak to a high of 19.8 per cent in the 1380s (see Fig. 15). The most popular fraternities to leave bequests to were St John the Baptist, for the gild of tailors, in St Paul’s Cathedral (a total of 12.5 per cent of all 128 separate bequests recorded between 1338 and 1398), the fraternity of Salve Regina in the church of St Magnus the Martyr (7 per cent), and the drapers’ fraternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the St Mary-le-Bow (5.5 per cent).
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While the rise of such fraternities, linked often to crafts and trades as well as to local parish churches, was not solely precipitated by the successive waves of plague, it has been noted that it was ‘not by chance that every set of fourteenth-century London fraternity ordinances specifies in great detail the burial obligations of its members, and that the Black Death at least provided incentive, and means for formation of parish fraternities’;
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gifts to such bodies ensured that the charity was focused quite particularly on the testators’ neighbours, craft colleagues or friends.