The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

Fifteen-year-old royals must be even more inclined than ordinary fifteen-year-olds to think themselves immortal.

Bourchier, as one of those inconsequential little Frenchmen with fussy hair and a funny walk.

Several others in the wedding party also died, including, on September 2, Princess Joan, who left behind the memory of a girlish laugh and an unworn wedding gown

rakematiz: a thick, rich silk embroidered with gold.

Historian Norman Cantor thinks this is because her corpse was burned in October, when Mayor de Bisquale ordered the harbor set aflame. Intended to check the spread of the pestilence, the fire blazed out of control and destroyed several nearby buildings, including, notes Professor Cantor, Château de l’Ombriere, where Princess Joan died.

the English demigod sounded like every parent who has ever tried to make sense of something as senseless as a child’s death. “No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of grief, for we are human too.

“sickness and premature death often come from sin . . . by the healing of souls this kind of sickness [the plague] is known to cease.” There is no record of how many of the faithful drew hope from the bishop’s words.

over the first winter of the pestilence, the little towns of southern England began to die, each in its own way.

The following May, as a spring sun warmed the gray slabs of Stonehenge, the only sound to be heard on the nearby Wiltshire estate of Carleton Manor was birdsong. Carleton’s water mills stood quiet, its farmlands untilled, and twelve of its thatched cottages empty.

the laity wanted to dig a plague pit outside the city; but the clerical establishment, led by Bishop Edendon, resisted. The plague pit would be on unconsecrated ground, and people buried on such ground might be overlooked on Resurrection Day.

bromides.

A group of townsfolk attacked a monk while he was saying a funeral Mass.

Other parts of Hampshire county also became “abodes of horror and a very wilderness” over the first winter of the pestilence.

At Southampton, where the Italians came to buy English wool and the French to deliver wine, contemporary records indicate that as much as 66 percent of the beneficed clergy may have died in the first winter of the plague.

Recent research indicates that many of the “lost” villages actually succumbed to economic atherosclerosis; others, though given a final nudge into oblivion by the mortality, were already so weak economically, death was inevitable.

“death without sorrow, marriage without affection, want without poverty and flight without escape.”

wonted

his wardrobe probably consisted of one copy of four basic items—breeches (underwear), hose, a shirt, and a kirtle, an all-purpose overgarment.

Like many of his contemporaries, John probably slept naked. This common medieval habit must have made the work of X. cheopis, the rat flea, and P. irritans, the human flea, a good deal easier.

irascible

There was also more fresh meat and ale on village tables, and many of the vexatious old feudal obligations were beginning to disappear. In a way, 1066 was even being avenged.

As mid-century approached, vernacular English, the language of ordinary folk like John, was replacing French, the language spoken by the Norman conquerors of 1066, and the official language of the English aristocracy and government.

The combination of rain, cold weather, and the rapid dash along the wintry English coast had left Y. pestis winded.

From the fall of 1348 to the fall of 1349, the first year of the pestilence, 740 people died at Farnham—a mortality rate of about 20 percent.

During the first year of the pestilence, the crops were harvested on time and in the usual amounts

When a tenant died, the lord of the manor was entitled to the dead man’s best beast of burden as a death tax. Usually the heriot, as the tax was called, was a boon for the lords, but so many peasants were dying in the winter of 1348–49, estates had more animals than they knew what to do with.

The second year was harder. Death had become so pervasive, whole families were being obliterated now. Forty times that second year, the name of a deceased tenant was read aloud in manor court, and forty times no blood relation came forward to claim his vacant holding.

marriage all but vanished.

to convey the sense that the country was not slipping into anarchy,

A NIGHTTIME WALK ACROSS MEDIEVAL LONDON WOULD PROBABLY take only twenty minutes or so, but traversing the daytime city was a different matter.

one night after the plague, Rykener “was detected in women’s clothing . . . in a stall near Soper’s Lane committing detestable, unmentionable and ignominious acts with a John Britby.”

Rykener for a woman and when he discovered his mistake, concluded that no one was perfect.

During the Great Mortality, England continued to be governed vigorously. The royal courts and the Exchequer (Treasury) remained open, tax collectors collected taxes, and the diligent king kept an eye on everything from the French to rising wages, which he froze in 1349 and again in 1351.

During the fall, says Professor Ormrod, the government seems to have gone from one extreme to the other: from apathy and indifference to something akin to panic.

London produced no great plague chroniclers on the order of Agnolo di Tura or Giovanni Boccaccio.

Such loud and lamentable cries were to be heard as we walked along the streets that would pierce the very heart to think of.”

If a measure of a civilized society is the ability to bury its dead with dignity, then evidence from the plague pit suggests that civilization held in London.

Some of the plague dead in the trenches were buried in caskets and shrouds, and everyone was laid out the same way: side by side, heads to the west, feet to the east.

When archaeologists excavated the middle section of one trench, dozens of London children gazed up into the English sky for the first time in seven hundred years.

Assume London had a population of sixty to seventy thousand—the low end of current estimates—and the city would have been virtually depopulated by August 1349.

If medieval London had seventy thousand souls, a reasonable estimate, that would mean a death rate of close to 50 percent.

In a fit of antiunionist frenzy, the pestilence also struck down the leaders of many of the city’s powerful trade guilds,

Survivors of the mortality did indeed rebuild their lives and their societies, but as the poem “The Black Death of Bergen” observes, the memory of what they had endured never left them:

University of Chicago psychiatrist, noted several parallels between the Lost Generation of the Great War and the generation

In the years before the plague, the peasants of fertile Champion Country watched in awe as their counterparts who lived along the German Ocean transformed a land of light sandy soils, moody skies, and small, uneconomic farms into the most densely cultivated region of England.

It was almost as if, unhinged by the bloodletting in the narrow, fetid lanes of Bristol and London and Winchester, Y. pestis had forgotten the first rule of survival for an infectious disease: leave some survivors behind to carry on the chain of infection.

Despite the losses sustained by the clergy, the plague weakened the authority and prestige of the institutional Church. To some degree, this was a by-product of disillusionment.

Europe emerged from the plague still a believing society, but after a four-year journey through the heart of darkness, people did not believe in quite the same way they had before.

The low quality of the new clerical recruits also produced disillusionment. Many of the replacements were either very young and ill trained,

is that of a clergy doing its daily work but with reluctance and some timidity, thereby incurring the worst of the danger but forfeiting the respect it should have earned. Add to this a few notorious examples of priests deserting their flocks