There is little chapter and verse to illustrate the upsurge of class hatred which arose during the plague. ‘Before 1789’, wrote Baehrel in explanation of this in France, ‘this sentiment of hatred left few traces: the poor rarely use a pen.’ But subsequent epidemics have made it clear how quickly the feelings of the underprivileged could be embittered. During the cholera epidemic of 1832, when slightly greater sophistication if not tolerance might have been expected, the Parisian mob rioted through the smarter quartiers, accusing nobles and bourgeois not only of suffering less seriously from the disease but of poisoning their impoverished fellow-citizens into the bargain. Who can doubt that the vastly more credulous and worse afflicted poor of the fourteenth century must have felt the same rancour and suspicion? If they failed to sack the houses of the rich it can only have been because the torpor induced by famine and misery had already broken their spirits before the plague began to work on their emaciated bodies. But, in the last analysis, the most noticeable feature of the Black Death was not that some escaped but that everyone was to some extent involved and paid the price of involvement. For the months which the Black Death lasted it must have seemed to those who suffered that everything was discredited and at an end. The doctors could cure nobody and, by their efforts, made themselves a laughing stock. The Church was impotent to defend itself or its faithful and had resort only to muttered objurgations about the sinfulness of mankind. The rulers abandoned their palaces and their responsibilities and left their people to die in misery. And the Black Death spared nobody.
Death had always been a preoccupation of medieval man; now it became an obsession. Always he had known that in time it must come to everyone but never before had the fact been brought so forcibly to his attention. Never before had those set in authority over him been shown so clearly to be no braver, no better, no wiser and no less vulnerable. Like every other lesson, it was to be forgotten but, at that moment, it must have seemed that its memory would never fade.
It is impossible that England should have been spared such tensions but even the somewhat scanty evidence for their existence which is to be found in the countries of continental Europe is lacking this side of the Channel. The maltreatment of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, which was mentioned at the beginning of this digression, could possibly have had such an origin, yet equally some quite different factors, of which we now know nothing, may have been responsible. A monk was beaten up in Winchester yet, as we shall see, there was good and sensible reason for his misfortune.{246} A spirited battle between monks and townsmen took place in Hull but such affrays, in Hull, were practically a local sport and call for no special explanation. The excesses of the Flagellants found no favour with the people of London and the few Jews who still lived in England were left in peace. The Bishops were constantly at work to whip up penitential fervour and not to curb it. A few incidents of panic or violence can be culled from the contemporary chronicles but nothing remotely suggestive of mass-hysteria.
Can one deduce from this that the Englishman, in the face of quite as grave a danger, proved more phlegmatic or better disciplined than his continental contemporary? It would be hazardous to push the argument too far. To argue that something must be true because of lack of evidence to the contrary is always dubious. When the evidence either way is as scanty as in England of the fourteenth century it would be folly. But what can be said with fair confidence is that any widespread movements on the scale of those experienced in Spain, France or Germany could not have escaped the attention of the chronicler. For one reason or another the Englishman did not indulge in the massive disorders in which others found an outlet for their emotions.
There is no reason to exclude national temperament from the complex of factors which must explain this omission provided that one does not try to erect too pretentious or elaborate a structure on the small basis of established fact. Even in the fourteenth century, when inadequate communications and the weakness of the central government ensured that loyalties were still primarily to the lord, the community or the region, there was already apparent a consistency in English life and character which it would be absurd altogether to ignore.
‘They could not, they would not be driven or frightened out of what they dimly comprehended they had to do.’ The words were applied by Drew Middleton to the Londoner in the blitz{247} but they fit as well in the fourteenth century. One of the most striking features of the Black Death in England, attested to in the Court Rolls of innumerable manors and those borough records that are still available, is the way in which communal life survived. With his friends and relations dying in droves around him, with labour lacking to till the fields and care for the cattle, with every kind of human intercourse rendered perilous by the possibility of infection, the medieval Englishman obstinately carried on in his wonted way. Business was very far from being as usual but landlord and peasant alike did their best to make it so.
The simple structure of the more or less self-contained medieval village was, of course, far easier to maintain under stress than the elaborate social infrastructure of contemporary civilization. So far as the typical peasant was concerned, England’s was a subsistence economy and to have let it founder would have been to cease to exist as a society, almost, indeed, to cease to exist at all. But the Englishman did more than just keep alive. Though the Black Death violently distorted the pattern of village life, wherever it was possible to do so taxes were paid and manorial services rendered; the quick not only buried their dead but dutifully paid the fines on inheritance which were owing to the landlord. Within a few months one cell alone of Bruton Priory received fifty head of oxen and cattle as heriots; one for each tenant who died. Here and there the burden was too great; organized society ceased to exist for a few weeks or months, perhaps even for ever. But such cases were the exception. By and large, and to a greater extent than seems to have been true in continental Europe, the fabric of society survived.
Was this a condemnation of the Englishman’s timid conservatism? Or a triumph for his durability and determination? Or merely a reflection of the fact that the English had had longer to get used to the idea and that fatalism had set in? The interpretation is a matter of taste and no formula could fail to be a misleading over-simplification. But it can at least be said that the Englishman’s reaction, or lack of reaction, was a victory for the system under which he lived. It can be argued that, in the long term, the Black Death struck a fatal blow at the manorial system and heralded the end of the Middle Ages. Be that – for the moment – as it may; in the short term the Black Death provided an impressive tribute to the system’s strength and to the readiness of the Englishman to accept the security which it offered and the limitations which it imposed.
Judging by the rapid progress of the plague along the coast of North Devon and Somerset, the infection travelled by boat by way of the Bristol Channel as well as by the slower inland routes. Whether it arrived first by land or water at Bristol is uncertain; the latter, probably, though any port which was the centre of such a busy traffic would have been an early victim in either case. Bristol, the principal port of entry for the West Country, with something close to ten thousand inhabitants, was the first important English city to be affected. ‘There died’, recorded Knighton, ‘suddenly overwhelmed by death, almost the whole strength of the town, for few were sick more than three days, or two days, or even half a day.’{248}