The Black Death in London (3 page)
Whatever this pestilence was, it had clearly been sufficient to reduce the labour pool in the city, and the city’s response to attempt to limit wages presaged the stringent statutory measures which would be introduced following the devastating pestilence of 1348–9. The early 1340s pestilence left no obvious trace within the wealthier will-making group represented by the Husting rolls;
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it may of course have affected the poorer strata of the city more seriously than the wealthy, but it is noteworthy that a plague apparently significant enough to elicit a response from the city authorities regarding mortality levels could be otherwise invisible in the testamentary record. So the London of the 1340s had experienced epidemics, but that experience would not have prepared the citizens and residents for what was to come just a few years later. The years 1348 and 1349 were to witness the unfolding of the ‘most lethal catastrophe in recorded history’.
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An Image of London in the 1340s
It is helpful to sketch out an image of London by way of setting the scene. The city in the reign of Edward III was by European standards impressive. By English standards it was a colossus, and it dominated national and overseas trade, political and courtly interests. In 1339, just a decade before the events described in this book, it was described as a ‘mirror and example to the whole land’. A conurbation comprising the walled city, extensive suburbs, Southwark across the Thames, and Westminster, its resident population probably numbered near 80,000 souls in 1300, four times the size of Norwich, and ten times that of Great Yarmouth. It was the hub of an international trade network which brought merchants from across the known world by both land and sea. It boasted a very diverse economy, a complex civic administration that was emulated elsewhere, the largest concentration of religious houses, hospitals and friaries in the land, and crucially, at Westminster, the coalescing centre of national government.
Its walled circumference was essentially Roman, with the exception in the west of the westward bulge of the Dominican friary, and in the east the vastness of the Tower. At its spiritual heart lay St Paul’s Cathedral, Romanesque at its core, but with considerable, newly completed work including one of the greatest spires in Europe dominating the skyline finished in 1314; nearby, a little to the north-east, stood the great Guildhall, seat of the principal civic administrative rulership in the form of the mayor and aldermen. The city’s economic engine was the extensive waterfront, then a complex mixture of stone river walls and timber revetments, docks, wharves and cranes projecting outward into the highway that was the Thames. Vessels clustered around these, loading and off-loading the prodigious quantities of exports and imports, to be transferred away along bustling lanes such as Dowgate, Billingsgate and Oystergate up to the warehouses, shops and markets that lined the streets. Major markets could be found within the city, such as at the Shambles (meat market), Poultry (poultry market) and Cornhill (grain market); and major yearly fairs took place at, for example, West Smithfield (livestock) and Westminster Abbey.
The houses were a mixture of numerous fine stone mansions, such as John Poulteney’s Coldharbour, or towered complexes such as Servat’s tower at Bucklersbury, and the more modest wooden and stone tenements packing in perhaps 60,000 inhabitants in all in 1348. Gardens there were too, in numbers, with fruit trees and livestock regularly referred to in the documents, and some areas, especially the north-western quarter of the city, may have presented a surprisingly green aspect. Industry was everywhere, at a craft or cottage scale and sometimes on a more intensive basis as in Cripplegate in the north-west and St Mary Axe in the north-east, where archaeological evidence for metalworking covering multiple plots has been found.
One hundred and twenty parish churches served the religious needs of this teeming population with their belfries, fonts and churchyards for the dead, but as well as these, London’s great influence had drawn the religious orders to found numerous monasteries and nunneries. Outside Aldersgate lay St Bartholomew’s priory and hospital, and across the great livestock market at West Smithfield stood the great priory of St John of Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller, and the nunnery at Clerkenwell; west, towards Westminster, was the Carmelite (White) friary, and next to it, the halls and church of the disbanded Knights Templar, now filling with London’s growing cadre of lawyers and appellants.
Inside Newgate stood the Franciscan (Grey) friary, not far from the Dominican (Black) friars against the extended city wall to the south, and even closer to the venerable college of St Martin-le-Grand. On the eastern side of the city gathered a similarly impressive group of monastic houses. St Helen’s nunnery in Bishopsgate stood south of St Mary Bethlehem (of Bedlam fame), which in turn was neighbours almost with the great hospital priory of St Mary Spital, just beyond the gate itself. At Aldgate stood the impressive church and priory of Holy Trinity, and south and east of this stood, inside the walls, the house of the friars of the Holy Cross (the ‘Crutched Friars’). Beyond them was the house of the sisters known as the Poor Clares, or Minoresses, Franciscan nuns who passed their name to the area of the Minories. Concluding the circuit, to the south-east of the Tower lay the third of the city’s hospitals, that of St Katherine. Most of these were well established, having been founded as much as two centuries earlier, but two were very recent. The hospital and priory of St Mary founded by William Elsyng, the remains of whose church still stand on London Wall just east of the Barbican Centre, was less than twenty years old, and the college founded by Sir John de Pulteney, or Pountney, adjacent to the parish church that still bears his name, St Lawrence Pountney, was down towards the river.
The prisons at this date, especially the Fleet prison and nearby Newgate, were fearsome places where, without external support, one ran the real risk of starving to death or being consumed by sickness. Equally feared was the humiliation, agony and significant risk of long-term damage from a few hours on Cheapside’s famous pillory, with the rotting meat or counterfeit clothing burned beneath the villain’s face: some would risk a prison sentence to avoid this particular punishment. The theft of two oxen and three cows from outside Aldersgate earned Thomas de Braye a hanging in March 1348, and the spikes of London Bridge held traitors’ heads fresh from Tower Hill or Tyburn, or the less well-known execution site at Nomannesland out towards Clerkenwell.
From among the riverside quays the many-arched twelfth-century stone bridge spanned the Thames south to Southwark. This was considered a suburb by many, but with a population of perhaps 5,000 it was large enough to justify being called a town.
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The houses, including some fine mansions such as that of the Prior of Lewes, clustered near the bridgehead and along the main north–south road, or, like Dunley’s Place, along the waterfront.
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The settlement had several parish churches and two important religious houses – the Cluniac monastery at Bermondsey to the east and, near the bridgehead, the Augustinian priory of St Mary Overy. To the west of the priory lay the extensive waterfront palace of the Bishop of Winchester. The hospital of St Thomas lay set back from the main high street, and at the extreme southern end of the settlement could be found the leper hospital known as The Lock. Southwark was the site of numerous brothels, and by the 1370s held two prisons – the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea.
Westward from the city extended a ribbon development along Fleet Street and the Strand towards Westminster. By the fourteenth century this road was lined with the mansions of the elite, of earls, dukes and bishops such as those of Carlisle, Norwich and Durham, linking the economic powerhouse of the city with the centre of national government now firmly established at Westminster Palace.
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Among these houses, closer to the city, stood the great Temple, the former house of the dissolved Knights Templar, and in the mid-fourteenth century leased out by the subsequent owners, the Knights Hospitaller, to lawyers and appellants serving the city and the court. Suitably isolated to the north of this thoroughfare was the leper hospital of St Giles-in-the-Fields, near the junction of modern Charing Cross Road and New Oxford Street.
Westminster itself was dominated by the royal palace and the great abbey, forming the heart of government in the kingdom. It is easy to forget that the town was significant in its own right with a population probably exceeding 3,000 before the plague.
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It too had a parish church, a leper hospital at St James in the Fields, and a hospital for the sick at St Mary Rounceval, near Charing Cross.
These three principal hubs of urbanism were, of course, ringed by numerous manors, with their attendant villages and hamlets, such as Islington, Tottenham, Stepney, Kingsbury and many more, sited on or near the main highways that brought the trade of the nation into the heart of London. The manor houses were often owned by London citizens, forming rural retreats away from the hubbub of city life.
This was London on the eve of the pestilence.
The Threat to England
The Black Death had already begun its spread across Europe as early as 1347, and its march has been charted elsewhere.
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Its route to Britain was almost certainly from France, and we know that by January 1348 it had started killing people in Avignon. Toulouse and Perpignan were affected by April, Lyons in May, Givry in July, and Bordeaux and Paris by August. Seaborne infection had seen deaths beginning in Rouen in late June, although Caen does not appear to have been affected until September, and Calais not until December.
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This rate, though terrifyingly rapid for those caught up in it, did provide sufficient time for the knowledge to spread and for the implications to be considered at the highest levels. Many Londoners must have known of the impending threat weeks or even months before it arrived. England was a trading nation and one at war with its neighbour; despite the obvious interruptions to cross-Channel communications that accompanied the conflict, many merchants in the capital must have been aware that by spring 1348, city after French city was falling before the scourge. Pilgrimages to European shrines were an important part of everyday medieval life, and travellers returning from St James de Compostella, Rome, and other key religious centres that had been affected early on must also have brought tales of woe and destruction. We have to assume that knowledge of its approach was thus reasonably widespread in the city long before the disease itself made landfall, threatening to spread panic and terror.
It is, in fact, rather hard to establish exactly how early the threat did register with Londoners. The documentary evidence for very early intelligence is slight and oblique. We have no London pilgrim’s accounts, no mention in administrative documents from the city, and, so far, no references in surviving merchants’ documents. The earliest evidence appears in papal correspondence in late spring 1348. On 15 May King Edward sent a team of papal diplomats to visit Pope Clement VI at Avignon to negotiate an extension of the existing truce in the war between England and France. The team comprised John Carlton, chancellor of Wells Cathedral, Thomas Fastolf, Archdeacon of Wells and a papal chaplain, and, significantly for London, John de Reppes, prior of the London Whitefriars and papal envoy since 1343.
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This advance party was clearly intended to negotiate a stop-gap in the war; they were given power only to discuss a maximum of one year’s extension to the truce, pending the intended dispatch towards the end of September 1348 of the Earls of Lancaster and Arundel, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, with a view to a more binding arrangement. It is Carlton’s signal to the Pope that his mission was limited which provides us with the first clear evidence that, in English diplomatic circles at least, the potency of the pestilence was recognised. Acting on information received from Carlton before 30 May, the Pope wrote to Philip of France to exhort him likewise to send envoys to Avignon, stating that the archbishop and the two earls were due to come from England to the papal court at Michaelmas (29 September) to give their consent to the prolongation of the truce, ‘unless hindered by the epidemic’.
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Since Carlton was the source of the information, de Reppes and Fastolf must have known, and it is almost certain that such a plan had been discussed in advance with Edward. We may therefore safely conclude that the English king and at least one London prelate both knew as early as May 1348 that an epidemic had gripped France, and that Englishmen abroad were at risk. The king most likely knew much earlier than this, but proof is wanting.
There seems to have been no further indication of English activity or preparation for any such crisis in June. In Europe, however, stresses were reaching breaking point. On 5 July, in response to a growing popular suspicion of the source of the plague and resultant violence against them in Germany and other countries, Clement VI attempted to protect Jews by the reissue of the Bull ‘Sicut Judeis’.
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While it clearly did not directly affect England in any substantive way, it is likely that knowledge of the Bull would have made its way there quickly, providing another route along which knowledge of the pestilence might have flowed to London. By the end of the month, the king’s concerns over the plague and its effect on his subjects overseas were growing. On 25 July, following the election of William de Kenyngton to the abbacy of St Augustine Canterbury, Edward, ‘in view of the war with France then imminent, the dangers of the ways and the peril of death, by letters patent prohibited [William] from going’ to Rome to confirm his elevation.
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The reference is oblique, and plague is not specifically mentioned, but the reinforcement of three kinds of danger, including ‘peril of death’, is strongly suggestive of prior knowledge of the damage being wreaked by the disease which had, by this date, reached northern France.