If eight hundred beneficed clergy died in East Anglia, well over twice as many priests must in all have perished. Taking into account subsequent desertions there must have been at least two thousand vacancies; nearly two thousand five hundred if Cambridgeshire be included. Given that this was a national and not a local problem and that all the other dioceses were in competition for the limited intake of new priests and remembering the diminished appeal of a priest’s métier when he could not even be guaranteed a living wage, it will be obvious that the task of replacing the dead was prodigious. That it was not altogether impossible is because the Church in 1348, like agriculture, seems to have been a decidedly over-manned profession. Far more of the land-owning families had unloaded their younger sons on the Church than the available parishes could comfortably accommodate and there was therefore a surplus of clergy in search of benefices which could be drawn on at least to plug the more attractive gaps.
But even allowing for this, it was more than the Bishops of Norwich and Ely could do to build up the numbers of their clerics without some loss of standard. Jessop denies that there was any serious decadence in the East Anglian church after the Black Death{340} but certainly the educational level of the new priests was lower than that of their predecessors and, even when they were literate, they were often middle-aged men with little sense of vocation but widowed by the plague and looking for some way to fill the rest of their lives.
Nor were all the new recruits as estimable as this. The Rev. William, priest of the manor of Waltham, was appointed early in 1350. His extra-parochial activities earned him the nickname of ‘William the One-day priest’, a title which he amply justified when he held up Matilda, the wife of John Clement de Godychester, and robbed her of her purse. For this offence he was arrested and, one must fear, eventually hanged. The Rev. William was certainly exceptional and such exceptions were not uniquely to be found in the mid-fourteenth century. Delinquent priests cropped up in every generation. But in the conditions of 1350 and 1351 it came as less of a surprise when priests behaved with a striking degree of impropriety. In East Anglia at least the reputation of the clergy stood lower after the plague than before it.
11. THE MIDLANDS AND THE NORTH OF ENGLAND
THE Black Death splattered the central part of England with the same haphazard venom as it had shown in the south. In Huntingdonshire it seems to have followed much the same course as in East Anglia. By 1363, read the preamble to the city charter, Huntingdon ‘was so weakened by mortal pestilences and other calamities’ that it was quite unable to pay its taxes. A quarter of the town was said to be uninhabited and the remaining residents could scarcely find the means of supporting life.{341} Three churches were derelict, their parishioners either dead or departed. Since the citizens were hoping to get some remission of their taxes it was obviously in their interests to paint the picture as black as possible but, even allowing for this, it is clear that things were in a bad way. But it is worth reiterating yet once again that the misfortunes of Huntingdon, as with many rural areas in England, were not solely due to the Black Death or even to the cumulative effects of the various epidemics. One of the ‘other calamities’ referred to in the city charter may have been the downfall of one of the local earldoms but more important and more constant was the economic decline of the whole area, and of Huntingdon in particular, which far preceded the violent shock of the plague. The barometer of Huntingdon’s health was the success of its great annual fair and the fourteenth century had already provided a dismal history of small attendances and dwindling revenues. The plague, of course, vastly accelerated the process but Huntingdon in 1353 would anyway have found unfairly onerous taxes which it could have paid with little trouble at the beginning of the century.
Northamptonshire seems to have been among the less afflicted of English counties. Mortality among the beneficed clergy of the archdeaconry was just under 37 per cent; a figure which was reasonably constant in all the deaneries. Only in Peterborough, another of those low-lying areas which were so remarkably well treated by the plague, was the level notably below the average at a mere 27 per cent.{342}
Stamford had a disastrous experience. It lost six incumbents in the six months between July and November 1349, and never recovered the impetus which was carrying it towards the status of an important town. After the Black Death the population remained more or less stable or even continued to decrease; the many references to ‘void places’ in the deeds of later years suggest that a long time passed before the ravages of the plague had been put right.{343}
Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester Abbey, who wrote some time after the Black Death but was an eye witness of the disaster, has left an account of the damage done by the plague in the English countryside.{344}
‘In this same year,’ he recorded,
a great number of sheep died throughout the whole country, so much so that in one field alone more than five thousand sheep were slain. Their bodies were so corrupted by the plague that neither beast nor bird would touch them. The price of every commodity fell heavily since, because of their fear of death, men seemed to have lost their interest in wealth or in worldy goods. At that time a man could buy for half a mark a horse which formerly had been worth forty shillings. A large, fat ox cost four shillings, a cow one shilling, a bullock sixpence, a fat wether fourpence, a sheep threepence, a lamb twopence, a large pig fivepence and a stone of wool ninepence. Sheep and cattle were left to wander through the fields and among the standing crops since there was no one to drive them off or collect them; for want of people to look after them they died in untold numbers in the hedgerows and ditches all over the country. So few servants and labourers were left that nobody knew where to turn for help.
No such universal or horrifying mortality had taken place within living memory though Bede, in his De gestis Anglorum, records that, in the time of Vortigern, king of the Britons, not enough people were left alive to carry the dead to their graves.
The following autumn it was not possible to get a harvester except by paying eightpence a day with food included. Because of this many crops were left to rot in the fields. However, in the year of the pestilence, these crops were so abundant that no one cared whether they were wasted or not.
In general the countryside was soon back to something near normal. Inevitably, some of the poorer villages were less well able to resist the depredations of the plague and the temptations offered by other, richer neighbours. At Wyville, between Melton Mowbray and Grantham, an inquisition post-mortem found ‘…the three carucates are worth little, for the land is poor and stony, and lies uncultivated for want of tenants after the pestilence’.{345} The village was never fully to recover. But, anyway in the Midlands, such cases were rare; and even Knighton, notoriously gloomy as he was, could have found little to shock him in the outward aspect of Leicestershire by 1354 or 1355.
‘The fearful mortality rolled on,’ recorded the canon of Leicester,