‘Almost the whole strength of the town’, need not be taken too seriously, but it does seem that the plague was particularly ferocious in the city and its environs. Statistics must, as usual, be extrapolated from scanty evidence. There were ten new institutions for eighteen benefices – a figure which suggests that mortality among clerics was above the average for that part of England. The Little Red Book of Bristol lists the names of the town council, the ‘Forty-Eight’, for 1349. Of the fifty-two members which the ‘Forty-Eight’ whimsically contained, the names of fifteen had been struck through to show that they were dead. If all these died of the plague the mortality rate would have been a little under thirty per cent; an unusually high figure for what must have been the cream of the city dignitaries. Things were undoubtedly a great deal worse in the crowded and stinking warrens in which the poor were forced to live. Boucher, the city historian, estimates an overall death rate in Bristol of between thirty-five and forty per cent and there is no reason to believe this figure exaggerated.{249} ‘The plague’, according to an old calendar, ‘raged to such a degree that the living were scarce able to bury the dead…. At this period the grass grew several inches high in the High St and in Broad St; it raged at first chiefly in the centre of the city.’{250} Cardinal Gasquet mentions the difficulties of the parson of Holy Cross de la Temple who had such urgent need to enlarge his graveyard that he took over an extra half acre without waiting for a royal licence. It is comforting to know that the King’s pardon was subsequently forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Exeter had also been afflicted. According to one local historian of the nineteenth century, ‘this dreadful calamity continued until the year 1357, when it happily ceased’.{251} Happily, indeed; but in fact there is no evidence to suggest that the plague in Exeter lasted longer than the usual span or that there was a renewed outbreak within the next few years. Another Exeter historian more prosaically states that the Black Death ‘arrested the building of the cathedral nave… paralysed our woollen trade and all commercial enterprise and suspended agricultural pursuits.’{252} Certainly, for two or three months, transportation in the area must have been reduced if not largely suspended, but Exeter, like every other English town in the fourteenth century with the possible exception of London, could live comfortably off the farms in its immediate neighbourhood. Though food may sometimes have been hard to buy for want of middlemen to carry, prepare and sell it, there is no reason to think that the threat of famine was added to the city’s miseries.
Inexorably the plague moved on through the West. It seems to have taken three or four months to complete its march but, by the middle of 1349, there can hardly have been a village in Devon and Cornwall which had not received its visit. At the isolated village of Templeton on the moors to the west of Tiverton there was no churchyard to accommodate the dead so that they had to be taken by cart-loads during the night to the other church at Witheridge.{253} The deanery of Kenn to the south and south-west of Exeter is believed to have been the worst affected in the whole of England; eighty-six incumbents perished from a deanery with only seventeen parish churches.{254}
One casualty, luckier than most in that it survived, though seeming near to death at the time, was the tin industry of the west country. By the time of the plague the ‘free miners’ of Devon and Cornwall were a prosperous and powerful group enjoying a striking degree of local autonomy. The annual output of tin was some seven hundred tons. The death of many miners and the virtual disappearance of the market proved disastrous. In the years immediately following the plague production dropped away to almost nothing. As late as 1355 no tin at all was being produced in Devon. But in the more important mines of Cornwall recovery was more rapid and by the end of the century output had reached a peak which had only once been exceeded before the Black Death.{255}
8. PROGRESS ACROSS THE SOUTH
Of which 22nd yeare and the next of the king’s raigne is little to bee written, nothinge being done abrode, in effect, through the great mortality of the plague that raged all over the land; which as the historiographers of that time deliver, consumed nine parts in ten of the men through England, scarce leaving a tenth man alive.{256}
For the historiographer concerned with the Black Death in England, 1349 is a year of which there is much to be written, for it was in the course of this year that almost every town and village was afflicted. At first it is possible to visualize the plague conducted, as it were, like a military operation. The initial attack on the Dorset ports; the bold thrust across country to the north coast so as to cut off communications between the western counties and the mainland; seaborne landings at points along the coast to outflank the defence; the slow mopping up of what opposition was left in Devon and Cornwall; and the main thrust towards the Thames valley and London. But after March 1349 the analogy with a controlled campaign can no longer be pursued. To change the metaphor, the dykes were down and the water was everywhere. The infection no longer advanced regularly from point to point but sprang up simultaneously in a hundred places; reaching its peak, for no reason that can be established, in Norfolk and Suffolk before Cambridgeshire; in Hampshire before Surrey; in Warwickshire before Worcestershire. By July it was spreading across the northern counties, by the end of the year nowhere had been spared. Through winter and summer, through flood and drought; against old and young, weak and strong; the disease went imperviously on its way. To track its course with any precision would be a hopeless task: the most that is possible is to register its impact in the various regions and to highlight its workings at a few points where fuller detail is available.
When the plague turned eastwards after reaching the Bristol Channel the first city to be threatened was Gloucester. The town council, horrified at the tragedy which had overtaken their neighbours in Bristol, decided to seek refuge in isolation. An embargo was placed on all intercourse between the two cities and the gates closed to any refugees who might carry with them the seeds of the plague.{257} But even if it had been possible to keep out every infectious human, and there is no doubt that the plague had been present in Bristol in its most virulent and infectious form, the citizens of Gloucester could have done nothing to protect themselves from the plague-bearing rat, making its way along the ditches or travelling in the river boats that plied up and down the Severn.
Bishop Wulstan Bransford remained on his country estate, occupied in the endless search for new priests to take the places of the dead. Between March and September alone eighty vacancies had arisen, almost all caused, according to the County History, by the death of the previous incumbent.{258} The Bishop himself died on 6 August 1349. At Ham, a manor belonging to the Berkeleys not far from Cheltenham, so much land either escheated to the lord because of the tenants’ death without an heir or was abandoned to look after itself that the bailiff had to hire the equivalent of 1,144 days’ work to get the harvest in. The figure is impressive but so also is the fact that the extra labour was forthcoming, though no doubt at a considerable price.{259}