The Black Death in London (6 page)

THE PESTILENCE
IN LONDON

The City Infected, November 1348

T
HERE SEEMS little reason to doubt that Avesbury’s date for the beginning of the nightmare was quite accurate. The making of wills suggests a significant increase at the very end of October: of the six wills drawn up in that month, four were dated to the last five days. Within three weeks, on 14 November, a papal indult was issued to all the clergy and people of both sexes of the city of London to permit them to choose confessors to give them plenary remission at the hour of death until Whitsuntide (31 May) 1349.
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Such broad permissions as much as admit that the ability for the existing clergy to service the last rites of the populace would shortly be (or indeed already was) compromised beyond any capacity for regular management. It may, therefore, have been with some measure of relief to Edward that on 13 November his mission met with success in extending the French truce to 1 September 1349. The agreement was signed by the representatives of the two countries, including on England’s side one Walter de Mauny, in Edward’s tents just outside Calais.
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Edward himself was not a signatory, but he was nearby and may have been present: in what has been described as a prominent propaganda exercise in the face of the oncoming pestilence, he had set sail for Calais on 29 October to see for himself what lay in store for his kingdom and his capital.
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Having seen the appalling impact of the pestilence, he headed back from France for Sandwich on 17 November. The scale of the threat to his kingdom must now have been starkly clear and decisive action was needed.

On 20 November he issued a summons to Parliament to all the archbishops, twenty-one principal bishops, twenty-eight abbots of the larger monastic houses, and three priors, to discuss ‘various urgent business
(urgentis negotiis)
and the state of our realm of England’. The summons to the Bishop of London warned that the dean and chapter of St Paul’s, and the archdeacons and clergy of his diocese, should also be present; the dean and archdeacons in person, the others by proxy. On the same day, he issued orders for sheriffs in Cornwall, Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Southampton, Essex, London, Surrey, Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincoln and Kent not to attempt to leave the country. These included the majority of southern and eastern coastal counties.

Three days later, on his return to Westminster, he issued orders effectively closing the ports of London, Dover, the warden of the Cinque Ports, Southampton, Newcastle, Harwich, Lynn, Ipswich, Rye, Boston, Shoreham, Great Yarmouth, Sandwich, Winchelsea and Kingston-upon-Hull; forbidding the crossing from England of any earl, baron, knight, squire or man-at-arms.
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It is true that the news regarding France would have been of considerable import to those concerned with the management of the spiritual and temporal needs of the realm, and there would have been an urgent need to ensure no inadvertent truce-breaking by over-zealous commanders. However, the measures taken to ensure that peacekeepers and arms-bearers could not leave the country also point to a major internal issue. It seems highly likely that these commandments and convocations were focused as much on what the kingdom could do about the pestilence, and that the restriction of movement was intended to ensure that a solid command and control structure remained in place in the realm, and in particular at the great ports such as London, during the crisis.

If such were the king’s plans, they were almost immediately confounded. The plague overwhelmed any intentions and, as will be seen shortly, the intended Parliament was never held. One man who might have expected to attend such a Parliament was Aleyn Ferthing, six-times Member of Parliament for the Borough of Southwark. His name is last mentioned in connection with a Parliament in 1348, and it seems certain that he perished in the epidemic. By chance, in 1832, workmen digging for a sewer on the site of the medieval church of St Margaret in Southwark found his Purbeck marble grave slab, inscribed
aleyn ferthing gist [ici dieu de son] alme eit merci amen.
It has been relaid in Southwark Cathedral,
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and is probably therefore the only extant funerary monument in London made at the time of the plague.

The king was, of course, not alone in his preparations against the unseen killer now rampant in the kingdom. The number of Husting wills drawn up increased to ten in the month of November, and included several city worthies. Sir John de Pulteney, four times mayor and founder in the 1330s of the college of priests attached to the church of St Lawrence (afterwards called Pountney), willed on 14 November the establishment of a chantry in St Paul’s Cathedral, and made arrangements for the sale of his great mansion called ‘Coldharbour’ for a price of £1,000. John de Kelleseye, a goldsmith from the parish of St Mary Aldermary, by his will dated 11 November, instructed his wife to distribute every month for her lifetime seventeen silver pennies, one each to twelve poor men, three pence to a poor infirm man, and two pence to a poor woman. John de Hicchen, a pepperer and the rector of the church of St Antonin since at least 1345, willed on 28 November that a fraternity called the wardens of the Honour of St Anne should celebrate anniversaries for his soul, presumably in the chapel of St Anne in his church.
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Hicchen’s will is particularly important. It was formally enrolled on 2 March 1349, but an addition on the will itself reveals that the actual date of his death was 2 December 1348, just four days after the will was drawn up, showing that enrolment could occur after a very considerable lag, and thus that many Londoners were very probably dying much earlier than the Husting enrolment evidence suggests. This lag explains why only three wills were enrolled in November, and none whatsoever in December. Indeed, it is only the dramatic rise in the number of wills made in December that indicate a catastrophe at all. The need for probate in the ecclesiastical courts prior to enrolment at Husting provides one reason for the lag, but it was almost certainly exacerbated by the plague itself: panic, death and confusion all would have led to changed priorities for survivors and a reduction in the operating efficiency of the courts. The significance of this lag relates clearly to our understanding of the actual speed of the plague’s transmission within the city.

Another possible indicator of sudden death is a ‘cluster’ of three presentations of guardianship to the courts between late October and the beginning of December. The children of John Broun of Fleet Street were entered formally into the guardianship of his widow Elena on 23 October; Alice, widow of John de Lauvare, acknowledged the receipt of certain sums of money in trust for their children Robert, Simon and Richard on 14 November; and on 5 December Nicholas Bole, a skinner, acknowledged guardianship of the daughter of Simon de Pulham, whose widow Katherine he had married.
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Wills do not survive for the three dead men, so we cannot be sure how recently they had perished, and furthermore such acknowledgements were not uncommon business in the courts. A cluster of three cases in seven weeks is, however, unusual.

The court of the Bishop of London’s own manor of Stepney, lying immediately to the north-east of the city, convened on 9 December and provides clear evidence of rising mortality. Six deaths of customary tenants, all living in the parish of Hackney, had occurred since 30 October. They included three siblings of a single family, Sarra, Thomas and Richard Pymme, holding between them one cottage, a third of a toft and 3 rods of land. That they were poor is demonstrated by the fact that they had no animals to offer as heriot (a kind of death tax) to the bishop as their lord.
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Bishop Edington took steps to save the souls of those who might die. On 17 November he wrote from his Southwark palace to his archdeacon in Winchester, granting to all rectors, vicars and chaplains across his diocese the right to hear confessions on account of the pestilence, requesting that they ‘encourage recourse to the sacrament of penance on account of unexpected death’.
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His diocese, of course, encompassed all of Surrey and thus numerous villages on the south bank of the Thames near London.

It is difficult to imagine what Londoners were facing during these first weeks of the plague. The disease and winter arrived in the city together, in a year already renowned for its storms and constant rain. John of Reading, a monk at Westminster during the plague (and another London eyewitness), wrote that rain had covered the south and west of England ‘from Midsummer to Christmas, scarcely stopping by day or night’.
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Short grim days and long dark nights set the scene for the unfolding horror. The knowledge that the plague was at hand would have sharpened a general fear into outright terror; every cough or twinge of pain a potential sign that a foul end was at hand. Reports would have spread through the city of the first deaths, perhaps down by the waterfront, or near the city gates; people may have tried to flee infected quarters or streets, before new deaths in previously untouched places set aside any thought of escape.

London’s experiences cannot have been too much different from other European cities, so we can envisage household after household ripped apart by the appearance of the symptoms on husband, wife, mother, sibling or child. Realising that the contagion had settled on them, did each, as in Piacenza,
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call out to friends and neighbours, ‘Have pity, have pity, my friends … say something, now that the hand of God has touched me’? Did they reach out to relatives drawing away in fear of becoming infected themselves? Did they call for water, and plead not to be abandoned for dead; plead for someone to hold them tight and comfort their wracked bodies?

Few who contracted the disease would survive for long. The symptoms as described in Piacenza in early 1348 must have been truly terrifying to witness. First a chilly stiffness and tingling spread through the body, then, often, the buboes, up to the size of an apple, made their appearance in the armpit or the groin, growing, hardening and burning with a fiercely intense pain. Fever consumed the victim, accompanied by an intolerable stench. Vomiting or spitting of blood and further swellings or blotches of dark blood on the skin surfaces were followed by collapse and a final coma. Geoffrey le Baker noted of English victims that, rather than developing buboes, some ‘had little black pustules scattered over the skin of the whole body’, and observed that of these very few indeed survived.
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The rapidity of the disease meant that the fate of the victim was decided in five days or less, most commonly three, a period confirmed by the Lambeth Palace clerk Robert of Avesbury, and another London eye-witness, Westminster monk John of Reading, who noted that ‘ulcers broke out in the groin or armpit which tortured the dying for three days’. The disaster chiefly overwhelmed the young and the strong, according to le Baker, ‘and hardly anyone dared to have anything to do with the sick’.
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In Florence a range of responses to the plague were observed in the citizens.
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Some stockpiled food and water and closed themselves off in their homes, refusing to speak with anyone and hoping perhaps to wait out the onslaught. Some, unable to take in the enormity of what was happening, turned to drinking and carousing, often making use of deserted private homes as much as taverns. Other citizens tried to continue their lives as normally as possible, but equipped themselves with posies of flowers or herbs to ward off the evil humours of the disease. A final group abandoned everything and attempted to flee the disease by leaving the city. No doubt Londoners reacted in very similar ways but, just as in Florence, no matter what course they took, the awful harvest continued to grow.

There seems to have been no issue of any formal ordinances by the London authorities to attempt to stem or hinder the path of the plague, despite the strict instructions issued in several European towns earlier in the year. In Pistoia, strict ordinances were issued in the spring of 1348. No one was to travel to or from neighbouring towns such as Lucca or Pisa. No one was to transport or trade in used cloth of any sort. The bodies of the dead were to be placed in a wooden casket covered by a lid secured with nails, so that no stench could issue forth, before being moved; that casket was also to serve as the burial coffin. No one was to move the dead into or out of the city under any circumstances, and funerals were to be strictly limited in scale. Men from each quarter of the city were to be selected to move the dead – no one else was to undertake this; such men were to be paid out of city funds on production of a written receipt from the monastery, church or hospital to which the body was delivered for burial. The ordinances also set strict limits on butchery and tanning.
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At Tournai, in August 1349, city ordinances were issued, according to the Abbot of St Giles, as a result of the ineffectiveness of the secular clergy. They set out the following: concubines should either be married or put away under threat of banishment. The dead should be coffined and the grave dug immediately, regardless of the hour, but Masses should be saved up until Sundays; graves should be at least 6ft deep and the coffins not stacked up, and there should always be three graves ready per parish. Funeral feasts should be curtailed and gatherings at the house of the dead avoided. Finally, there were restrictions on trading after noon on Saturday until the following Monday.