Buckinghamshire, where the Black Death was at its worst from May to September, does not produce a very different picture. In Wycombe a startling 60 per cent of the clergy died and it seems improbable that more than half the inhabitants stayed alive.{271} And yet by 1353 the town had recovered to the point that vacant plots for building were being sought by would-be householders. This however was true only of the town and not of the surrounding countryside, Wycombe’s renewed prosperity did not filter through to the Manor of Bassetbury on its outskirts where, even fifty years later, the water-mill was in ruins, the fulling mill and dye house untenanted, the barns of the manor in need of repair and the tenants generally enjoyed larger holdings and paid lower rents.{272} Meanwhile, at the manor of Sladen, near Berkhamstead, in a deanery which suffered comparatively lightly, a jury in August 1349 declared that the miller was dead and his mill anyway valueless since there were no tenants left to need his services. Rents to the value of £12 were no longer paid since all the cottagers were dead. One cottage, where a certain John Robyns survived and dutifully paid his 7s. 0d. a year, was the only part of the manor deemed still to be of value.
One is left therefore with the curious situation that a town in the centre of a deanery which lost almost as high a proportion of its beneficed clergy as any in the country, had largely recovered within three or four years, while a neighbouring manor was still in difficulties fifty years later and another manor, in a part of the county which seems to have been far less seriously afflicted, was virtually wiped out. One moral to be drawn is that it is dangerous to generalize even about relatively small areas – one village may suffer disastrously; another, only a mile or two away, escape virtually unscathed. Another moral, still more defeatist, is that all statistics relating to the Middle Ages, particularly those deduced by analogy or extrapolation, should be taken with a massive pinch of salt.
But a partial and somewhat more rational explanation lies in the nature of the different communities. A town like Wycombe, if well run and energetic, could draw away labour from the surrounding countryside. Many of the surviving villeins in the manors of the neighbourhood were disinclined to pick up the shattered pieces of the rural economy. Others resented the efforts of the landlords to exact feudal services which, in previous years when labour was cheap and plentiful, had been allowed to lapse or had willingly been excused against a modest money payment. In a market town, anxious to encourage immigration so as to foster its thriving trades and commerce, such malcontents could find a welcome and, with luck, protection against any effort on the part of the former masters to restore the strayed sheep to its manorial fold. Stadtluft macht Frei, went the adage; and certainly many fourteenth-century villeins savoured their first breath of freedom in some country town seeking to restore the ravages of the Black Death. Wycombe regained its strength at the expense of neighbouring manors like Bassetbury; some at least of the lost tenants of Sladen were probably to be found at work in St Albans or Wendover. That the second half of the fourteenth century showed a progressive depopulation of the countryside is now almost a truism: that many towns showed a corresponding growth would be extremely hard to prove. But at least there can be little doubt that many of them, against the trend of population in the country as a whole, managed successfully to hold their own.
Meanwhile the southern prong of the plague’s advance moved across Wiltshire and Hampshire. As in other areas, little points of certainty crop up above the mist of impressionistic vagueness. At Durrington, near Amesbury, eighteen out of forty-one tenants had disappeared by the end of 1349.{273} No rents of assize were paid at Tidworth. All the seven free tenants were dead on a moiety of the manor of East Dean and Grimstead and their lands were still standing vacant in 1350.
It would be possible to reel off a myriad such domestic details, each adding something to the overall picture but individually meaning little to the reader of today. To punctuate such a recital with constant ejaculations of dismay would be tedious to author and reader alike. But no study of the Black Death can make sense unless one constantly reminds oneself that this was not primarily a matter of statistics and social trends but of a shock of pain and appalling fear felt by many millions of people all over Europe. It is easy to say that medieval man lived closer to the threshold of death than his modern counterpart and that the impact of such wholesale destruction was therefore not so severe as it would have been today. But nothing could have prepared him for the horrors of 1348 and 1349. Behind the catalogue of bare ciphers, behind the laconic phrase ‘…because all the tenants were dead’, lurk innumerable personal tragedies, little if at all less painful because they seemed at that time to be the lot of all mankind.
The plague got a firm grip in Wiltshire before a significant number of cases occurred in neighbouring Hampshire. The lists of institutions to the benefices of Hampshire, assuming the usual gap of a month to six weeks between mortality and replacement, suggest that the first deaths took place at the very end of 1348, that the worst months were February and March 1349, and that things were more or less back to normal by the end of the year.{274}
But three months before the plague had struck, on 24 October 1348, William Edendon, alias Edyndon or Edyngton, Bishop of Winchester and former Royal Treasurer, had sent out warning orders to all the clergy of his diocese.{275}
‘A voice in Rama has been heard’; he lamented, ‘much weeping and crying has sounded throughout the various countries of the globe. Nations, deprived of their children in the abyss of an unheard-of plague, refuse to be consoled because, as is terrible to hear, cities, towns, castles and villages, adorned with noble and handsome buildings and wont up to the present to rejoice in an illustrious people, in their wisdom and counsel, in their strength and in the beauty of their matrons and virgins; wherein too every joy abounded and whither multitudes of people flocked from afar for relief: all these have already been stripped of their population by the calamity of the said pestilence, more cruel than any two-edged sword. And into these said places now none dare enter but fly far from them as from the dens of wild beasts. Every joy has ceased in them; pleasant sounds are hushed and every note of gladness is banished. They have become abodes of horror and a very wilderness; fruitful country places without the tillers, thus carried off, are deserts and abandoned to barrenness.’
Whether the inhabitants of these erstwhile earthly paradises would have recognized them from Edendon’s description may be doubtful but the picture of the fate which had overtaken them must have caused dismay in the minds of all his readers. For, went on the Bishop:
…this cruel plague, as we have heard, has already begun singularly to afflict the various coasts of the realm of England. We are struck by the greatest fear lest, which God forbid, the fell disease ravage any part of our city and diocese. And although God, to prove our patience and justly to punish our sins, often afflicts us, it is not in man’s power to judge the divine counsels. Still, it is much to be feared that man’s sensuality which, propagated by the tendency of the old sin of Adam, from youth inclines to all evil, has now fallen into deeper malice and justly provoked the Divine wrath by a multitude of sins to this chastisement.