‘There can be little doubt’, concluded Mr Allison,{329} ‘that the Black Death played no more than a contributory part in village depopulation in Norfolk.’ But though it is easy to exaggerate the destructive power of the plague, it would be far more misleading to minimize it. Great tracts of the county, in particular the barren Brecklands around Brandon, can literally be said never to have recovered. Economically weak and on the decline even before 1348, the blow which the Black Death then inflicted and, more insidious, the opportunities which the plague created for finding better land in other, more prosperous parts of the country, sealed the doom of these unlucky areas. The hold which civilization had established on the border-lands during the great expansion of the thirteenth century was especially weak in East Anglia. Now it was driven inexorably back and the wild took over its own again.
Bishop Bateman was conducting peace negotiations with the French when the plague neared the borders of his diocese. He returned by sea to Yarmouth on 10 June and was told on landing that his brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman of Gillingham, was already in his grave.{330} Hurrying to Norwich, he found the plague raging; his Vicar General, Thomas de Methwold, lurking at Terlyng in Essex; and his palace, next to the new cemetery in the Cathedral Close, made almost intolerable by the stench of the dead. He at once ordered Methwold to return to his duties but barely was the Vicar General back at work than the ‘intrepid Bishop’, as Dr Jessop hopefully called him, was himself on his way to his rural manor at Hoxne nearly twenty miles south of Norwich. He spent three days at Ipswich in the next few months but did not visit the capital of his diocese again till the plague was safely over.
Certainly Norwich was anything but a pleasant place to be in the summer and autumn of 1349. ‘There died’, recorded Blomefield, possibly confusing figures for the city with those for the county or diocese, ‘no less than 57,104 (or more rightly as others have it, 57,374) persons in this city only, besides religious and beggars.’{331} He admitted that this figure might seem surprisingly high since the population of Norwich when he wrote in 1806 was still quite a lot less than the casualties of 1349, but explained that the city, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was ‘in the most flourishing state she ever saw, and more populous than she hath been ever since.’ Given about a thousand inhabitants to each of the sixty-odd parishes and throwing in an allowance for the suburbs and the religious houses, Blomefield calculated that the total population of 1348 must have been a minimum of seventy thousand. Seebohm accepts that the death rate may have been in the neighbourhood of fifty-seven thousand but reduced the total population to sixty thousand; evidently feeling that a death rate of 95 per cent called for no special explanation.{332} Basing himself on the Leet Rolls Professor Russell estimates that the population of Norwich was some thirteen thousand in 1311.{333} Subtracting the poll tax figure for 1377 of 5,928, the figure for the population which remains to be accounted for comes remarkably close to 7,104; the last four figures of Blomefield’s total. Russell ingeniously surmises that the five at the beginning was added by some careless transcriber and that the ancient record to which Blomefield referred should in fact have been read as a broadly accurate seven thousand dead. He could be right but since, as he himself frequently points out, medieval statistics were invariably grossly over-stated, it seems easier to believe that the usual rule applied in the case of Norwich. What at all events seems certain is that Norwich, the second city of the kingdom, lost more than half its population and not only never recovered its position in relation to the rest of England but, in absolute terms, had barely regained its vanished citizens by the end of the sixteenth century.
Though the whole of Bishop Bateman’s diocese may not have suffered as much as its capital there is no doubt that mortality among the clergy was unusually high. In the years before the Black Death the average annual figure for episcopal institutions was eighty-one. In the year between 25 March 1349 and 25 March 1350 the total rose to 831.{334} For the population as a whole, Jessop remarked: ‘If any one should suggest that many more than half died, I should not be disposed to quarrel with him.’{335} It is unlikely that he would go so far if he were writing today but at least it seems certain that the death rate in East Anglia was well above the national average.
The Bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Ely was in Avignon when the plague reached his territories. He seems to have made no effort to return. He had already appointed five Vicars General to look after the diocese in his absence and, on 9 April, appointed an additional three ‘to exercise their duties until death’.{336} In his letter he referred to ‘the epidemic, as it is called, wondrously increasing in the diocese’,{337} a phrase soon to be fully justified but at the time a little premature since it was not till April that the plague took a serious grip in Cambridgeshire. He specified which of the Vicars General was to dispose of vacant benefices in his absence and carefully listed the order of succession to this attractive prerogative.
In the whole diocese there were eighteen times as many institutions as in a normal year, a far higher ratio even than in Norfolk and Suffolk. Only one of these institutions is known to have been due to the resignation rather than the death of the previous incumbent though there are other cases in which details are lacking.{338} But the incidence of the plague seems to have been even more erratic than in other parts of England. Within a radius of ten miles of Cambridge thirty-five out of fifty tenants died on the Crowland manors at Oakington, twenty out of forty-two at Dry Drayton, thirty-three out of fifty-eight at Cottenham and yet at the manors of Great Shelford and of Elsworth, though there may have been deaths which were not recorded in the Court Rolls, there is no evidence that the Black Death had any effects at all. All these communities were in broadly similar country with populations of between two and four hundred. Their inhabitants suffered the same weather, farmed the same land, ate the same food. No one, be he epidemiologist or historian, has yet been able to suggest plausible reasons why one manor should have lost half its tenants while another seems to have suffered little if any ill effects.
There is remarkably little to show how severely the plague affected the University at Cambridge. The only College which furnishes any useful material is King’s Hall where sixteen out of forty resident scholars died between April and August. But one can deduce that the losses among students must have been severe by what is known of events in the town of Cambridge. Though some of the damage may have been done by the second epidemic of 1361, an idea of the devastation is given by a letter from the Bishop of Ely written in 1366 which suggested the amalgamation of two of the city parishes on the grounds that there were not enough people left to fill even one of the churches. Practically the whole of the town on the Castle side of the river, ‘The Ward beyond the Bridge’, seems to have been wiped out. Most people in All Saints in Castro also died and the few parishioners left alive moved out. The nave of All Saints’ Church fell into ruins, leaving ‘the bones of the dead exposed to the beasts.’{339}