The Black Death in London (35 page)

BOOK: The Black Death in London

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Further afield, a partial skeleton of a black rat was recovered from an ashy occupation layer around a hearth in the stone hall of a moated manor at Chalgrove, Oxon, dated to the late fourteenth or fifteenth centuries; rat bones were found at the Bishop of Winchester’s manor in Witney, Oxfordshire, dating to the fourteenth century, and a similar partial skeleton was found in the guardroom of the inner ward of Barnard Castle in County Durham dated to 1330–1479. Finally, the presence of rats in a mid-fourteenth-century monastic setting is confirmed by references of payments made to rat-catchers at Durham Cathedral priory in 1347 and 1356.
⁵⁵⁹One researcher claimed: ‘There is nothing surprising about the almost complete exemption of the English nobility and landed class from “The Great Pestilence”. It just happened that the house-rat could not make itself at home in their castles.’
⁵⁶⁰The evidence both from London itself and other sites across England refutes this.

There are, however, significant blanks in just the places we might expect to find the evidence – for example, many of the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century waterfront reclamation dumps which have been sampled but from which no rat bones have been identified. By definition, such deposits are normally waterlogged (encouraging excellent organic preservation), they are composed of dumped urban rubbish behind wooden or stone revetments (and so should be expected to contain disposal evidence of any mid-fourteenth-century mass rat deaths) and they are precisely the locations where many plague historians have posited that the impact would be the worst – along waterways. These references do not represent a comprehensive national survey but, as far as the bubonic model is concerned, it would appear that the black rat was present and reasonably widely distributed in and around the London region. But we cannot yet speculate on the size and number of colonies that may have existed, and thus the degree to which they could have supported a widespread epizootic. The evidence, patchy as it is, proves that rats were present, but not that they carried the plague.

The second contribution concerns the seasonality of the outbreak. We can be certain that deaths had not reached plague proportions in London by 25 October 1348 (when Edington wrote his letter in his Southwark palace, praying that his own city and diocese of Winchester be spared the impending onslaught from the coast). We can be equally certain that that scale had been achieved by 14 November (when the blanket indulgence to all London citizens was issued by the Pope). Depending upon its incubation rate, the infection probably established itself in the city no earlier than late September or early October. This is much later than the date provided, for example, by Benedictow (4 August), which he calculated from the earliest chronicled date of 29 September, including an eight-week period for the bubonic plague to become epizootic and then epidemic. This delay in development may be crucial in terms of the environmental argument.

If the plague was bubonic, and the biology of the black rat and the flea is as has been stated, we would have to accept that this winter was a particularly mild one, as below 10°C bubonic plague spread is significantly slowed. London’s current average monthly temperature range does not exceed this figure from November through to March, and evidence from broader climate studies suggests that the fourteenth century saw deteriorating climatic conditions for much of northern Europe (and indeed globally), with oak growth rates at a consistently low level from the early 1340s for a decade, and one study of eastern England indicating at least three severe winters in the decade up to 1348.
⁵⁶¹So a mild winter does not appear to have been the case.

Fig. 6 (see p. 85), showing both the dates of writing and the dates of enrolment of wills, and the mortality rates for Stepney manor, establishes with as much certainty as can be hoped for that in the largest city in the land, the plague’s transmission speed increased as London slipped into the grip of winter. The only previous attempt to integrate the progression of the pestilence through London with the environmental and seasonal requirements of the bubonic model proposed that the first epidemic manifestation emerged in later September, leading into a phase of infection among the poor, drawn out by the cool autumn months. This triggered a scare among the wealthy leading to a rise in will-making in November and December, and was followed by a full explosion of plague with the arrival of warm, spring weather.
⁵⁶²The evidence from the Stepney manorial deaths refutes this ‘considerable’ time-lag between the onset of plague among the poor and the subsequent panic of the wealthy: the poor began to die exactly at the time when the richer began to draw up wills in exceptional numbers. The will enrolment trajectory matches very closely that of the will-making, and, taking the available evidence for lag between probate and enrolment, the likely death curve sits just three weeks later than the will-making curve. Therefore, the plague quite clearly escalated throughout the winter and had already peaked by Easter and the onset of warmer weather. This combination of circumstances does not appear to match the expected bubonic model. So for the traditional bubonic model to stand up we would have to accept that there were more rats than archaeological evidence is as yet offering, and that the winter was particularly mild. Even then, the chronology of the outbreak has been significantly revised.

This speed of transmission ought also to be considered in the light of the date at which the plague struck England as a whole (see above). Since official documentation suggests that the plague broke out in earnest possibly in late September and more certainly in October 1348, in a range of places from Dorset and north Devon right across to London, there would be insufficient time for the process of epizootic development in rat colonies, followed by spread into the human population, to allow for land-based transfer. We would need to accept that either London was infected directly from the Continent (quite possible) or that the agent was not reliant on rats and fleas.

A fourth contribution of the London evidence is that, as was first identified by Sam Cohn, the impacts of the four successive plagues under review reduces steadily and markedly. He suggests that some kind of immunity to the pathogen was acquired over a relatively short time. Such immunity would not be characteristic of modern bubonic plague.
⁵⁶³Cohn argues that the pestilence in Florence broke out not in the zone where the grain store was situated, a recurrent feature of twentieth-century outbreaks in India, but particularly in the impoverished, highly populated quarters of the city.
⁵⁶⁴London can advance no definitive evidence on this aspect of the plague since rich and poor lived very much side by side in the city, but there are hints that the pestilence killed the poor more readily.

A comparison of the rates of prevalence of bone lesions (picked up during life prior to contraction of the plague), from which those who were buried at the East Smithfield cemetery suffered, with those from pre-1348 medieval cemetery assemblage, has concluded that once infected, the weaker and less healthy individuals were more likely to succumb to the disease.
⁵⁶⁵It seems likely that, in general, poverty would contribute to an increased incidence of such environmental or occupational stresses. Coupled with the fact that the physical stature of those buried at East Smithfield was generally lower than other late medieval cemetery assemblages, this supports a general notion that the poor were more affected than the rich. In her consideration of the squeeze on day-patient care at Westminster Abbey from 1350 onwards, Barbara Harvey speculates that one possible reason may have been that ‘those who survived [the plague] were perhaps the fittest who did not have these kinds of needs’.
⁵⁶⁶

Therefore, while rats were present in London to act as a potential bubonic go-between, the season and speed of the outbreak would require that the epidemic was either very significantly a pneumonic variant bubonic plague, or was not bubonic plague at all. The apparent and rapid decrease in mortality rates of successive outbreaks after 1349 would suggest the latter. The need for more detailed scientific studies on pre-plague skeletal collections to establish the presence of
Y. pestis
ancient DNA would certainly help inform this debate.

NOTES

1
Translation of the Register of Charterhouse in St John Hope 1925, 7.

2
Benedictow 2004; Cohn 2002.

3
Röhrkasten 2001; Megson 1998.

4
Sharpe 1889, 1890.

5
CHW,Vol. 1, xiv; xxii: The wills related only to property in the city, setting a benchmark for those enrolling them; furthermore, enrolment of each cost 15
s
10
d
– a significant sum in itself.

6
The widest review of the wills is that of Weetman 2004, analysing trends from 1259–1370. Röhrkasten 2001 represents the most detailed review of the evidence for the period from 1348–1400. Other studies have included Cohn 2003, 197; Benedictow 2004, 136.

7
Freemen citizens and their families were a much smaller group than the entire resident population of London; it has been estimated that they made up slightly more than a quarter of the total population (CPMR, Vol. 2, xlvii–liv).

8
Röhrkasten 2001, 176–7; Megson 1998, 129.

9
From 1327–47, an average of twenty-eight wills were drawn up, and 27.2 enrolled per annum, ranging between a minimum of sixteen wills and fifteen enrolments (in 1344) and a maximum of forty-nine wills and fifty-two enrolments (in 1328): CHW,Vol. 1.

10
Estimates for 80,000 by about 1300 are provided in Keene 1984; a lower figure of 60,000 is argued in Nightingale 1996. The famine years of the early fourteenth century saw a national population drop of perhaps 10 to 15 per cent (e.g. Nightingale 2005, 44). The issue of whether the population subsequently rose or remained static between then and 1348 is unclear (Barron 2004, 239). I have elected to assume a population of 60,000 in 1348.

11
Between 1347 and 1375, women were responsible for just 13.8 per cent of all Husting wills, a figure that dropped to 12.1 per cent between 1375 and 1400.

12
Wood 2003.

13
VCH Middx 2, Appendix 1, 102–3.

14
Weetman 2004, 40–51.

15
Röhrkasten 2001, 180.

16
TNA SC 2/191/60.

17
DNB, 2, 378.

18
The disease was known to medieval people as the great mortality, pestilence or epidemic: the term ‘Black Death’ was not coined until much later.

19
Cohn 2003, 154; Riley 1863, 252; Martin 1996. Knighton was a canon of Leicester Abbey. An epidemic also visited Florence in March to June of 1340, causing many deaths (Henderson 1988, 253). This killed 34 per cent of men, 34 per cent of women and 32 per cent of children, buried by the Company of Roast Chestnuts in the parish of San Frediano.

20
CPMR, Vol. 1, 143–64.

21
Although in 1341 there had been forty-five wills drawn, compared to an average since 1327 of twenty-eight, and a figure of just twenty-one for 1343 itself: CHW,Vol. 1.