Chapter IV (1)

ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO THE TUDOR PERIOD.

The great mortality came to an end everywhere in England by Michaelmas, 1349. The pestilence had lasted some fourteen months, from its first appearance on the Dorset coast at the beginning of August, 1348, until its subsidence in the northern counties in the autumn of 1349. It came to an end, as all devastating epidemics do, through having spent its force, exhausted its pabulum, run through all the susceptible subjects. A letter-writer of Charles I.’s reign has put into colloquial language the corresponding reason for a pause in the ravages of the plague towards the end of its stay in London: “And I think the only reason why the plague is somewhat slackened is because the place is dead already, and no bodie left in it worth the killing[322].” The exhausted state of the country, and of all Europe, is not easy for us to realize. Petrarch, a witness of the Black Death in Italy, foresaw the incredulity of after ages, or their inability to image the state of things--the empty houses, the abandoned towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and dreadful solitude over the whole world. If you inquire of historians, he continues, they are silent; if you consult the physicians, they are at their wits’ end; if you question the philosophers, they shrug their shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the finger on the lip. Is it possible that posterity can believe these things? For we who have seen them can hardly believe them[323].

The blow fell upon every country of Europe within a period of two or three years; and it must have paralysed all trade and industry, war and politics, for the time being. Edward III.’s wars in France, which had resulted in the victory of Crecy in 1346 and the conquest of Calais in 1347, had been suspended by a truce, which was renewed from time to time. Thus, in the very midst of the pestilence, on the 2nd of May, 1349, the envoys of the English and French kings, “in their tents between Calais and Guines,” agreed upon a form of treaty continuing the truce until Pentecost, 1350[324]. In the last days of 1349, Edward III. in person, with a small force, was able to repel an attack upon his new possession of Calais[325]. It was in the year after the Black Death (1350) according to both Stow and Selden, that Edward III. held a great feast at Windsor, to which his heralds invited knights from abroad, to celebrate the institution of the Order of the Garter, the statutes of the Order having been drawn up the year before. What is styled “the necessary defence of the realm,” was a chief subject of concern throughout the year 1350. On the 12th February an order was made to the sheriffs of counties for a supply of so many arrows from each[326]. On the 20th March the mayors and bailiffs of 110 towns are ordered to provide their respective quotas of men-at-arms--London 100, Norwich 60, Bristol 20, and so on--and to send them to Sandwich “for the necessary defence of our realm[327].” On the 1st of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges.

On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties, to raise men “for our passage against the parts over sea”--one to the Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the 8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332] and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight ships[335].

Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality. The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of 1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the next six years. According to Avesbury’s calculation, Edward had a revenue, from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336]. But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337].

Direct effects of the Black Death.

Meanwhile internal affairs were demanding the king’s attention, although they occupy less space in the extant State papers than the warlike preparations. On the 23rd August, while the mortality was raging in the north, a proclamation was issued to the sheriff of Northumberland against the migration of people to Scotland, with arms, victuals, goods and merchandise, the pestilence not being mentioned[338]. The first State paper which relates to the recent great mortality is the king’s proclamation of 1st December, 1349, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, and of forty-eight other English ports, including London[339]. The proclamation begins:

“Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our realm of England is
dead in the present pestilence, and the treasure of the said realm is
mostly exhausted, and (as we have learned) numbers of this our kingdom
are daily passing, or proposing to pass, to parts over sea with money
which they were able to have kept within the realm, Now we, taking
heed that if passage after this manner be tolerated, the kingdom will
in a short time be stripped both of men and of treasure, and so
therefrom grave danger may easily arise to us and to the said realm,
unless a fitting remedy be speedily appointed--do command the mayor
and bailiffs of Sandwich (and of forty-eight other ports) to stop the
passage beyond sea of them that have no mandate, especially if they be
Englishmen, excepting merchants, notaries, or the king’s envoys.”

The edict was probably directed more against the drain of treasure than against the emigration of people; but this not uninteresting question really belongs to other historians, who do not appear to have dealt with it[340].

On the 18th of June, 1350, the first summer after the mortality, there was issued the first proclamation, to the sheriffs of counties, on the demands of the labourers and artificers for higher wages, entitled “De magna parte populi in ultima pestilentia defuncta, et de servientium salariis proinde moderandis[341].” The preamble or motive is one that cannot but seem strange to modern ideas, although it must have been correct and conventional according to feudal notions: “Forasmuch as some, having regard to the necessities of lords and to the scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive wages, while others prefer to beg in idleness, rather than to seek their living by labour--be it therefore enacted that any man or woman, bond or free, under the age of sixty, and not living by a trade or handicraft, nor possessing private means, nor having land to cultivate, shall be obliged, when required, to serve any master who is willing to hire him or her at such wages as were usually paid in the locality in the year 1346, or on the average of five or six years preceding; provided that the lords of villeins or tenants shall have the preference of their labour, so that they retain no more than shall be necessary for them.” It was strictly forbidden either to offer or to demand wages above the old rate. Another clause forbids the giving of alms to beggars. Handicraftsmen of various kinds are also ordered to be paid at the old rate. Lastly, victuallers and other traders are directed to sell their wares at reasonable prices[342]. The same ordinance, with some added paragraphs, was reissued on the 18th November, 1350, to the county of Suffolk and to the district of Lindsey (Lincolnshire), the latter being one of the chief sheep-grazing parts of England; in those two localities, it is stated in so many words, the labourers had set at nought the ordinance of 18th June[343]. When Parliament met--for the first time since the mortality--on the 9th of February, 1351, it was acknowledged that the commissions to sheriffs issued by the king and his council had been ineffective, and that wages had been at twice or thrice the old rate[344]. The Parliament, having legislated for a number of technical matters in connexion with the enormous number of wills and successions, proceeded next to the labour question, and passed the famous Statute of Labourers, by which the generalities of the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, are replaced by an elaborate schedule of wages for harvest-time and other times[345]. One clause of the Act is specially directed against the migration of labourers to other counties. It was the ancient manorial system that was threatened most of all by the depopulation. The surviving labourers sought work where they could command the best wages, and at the same time could escape from the few degrading bonds of servitude which still clung to the _nativi_ or serfs of a manor. But the Manor Court was still the unit of government, and the Act would have been inoperative except on that basis. That fundamental intention of the statute of the 9th February, 1351, comes out, not only in the explicit clause against migrations, but also by contrast, in the special permission given to the labourers of the counties of Stafford, Derby and Lancaster, to the people of Craven, and to the dwellers in the Marches of Wales and Scotland, to go about in search of work in harvest “as they were wont to do before this time[346].”

The immediate effect of the depopulation had been to mobilise, as it were, the labouring class. Many of them must have taken the road at once; for, in the first ordinance of 18th June, 1350, before the harvest of that year had begun, it is stated that certain of the labourers preferred to live by begging instead of by labour, and it is therefore forbidden to give alms to beggars. According to Knighton, the effect of the ordinance itself was to swell the ranks of the wandering poor; when some were arrested, imprisoned, or fined in terms of the commission to the sheriffs, others fled to the woods and wastes (_ad silvas et boscos_)[347]. These escapes continued for years after; the rolls of the Manor Court of Winslow have entries of many such cases long after the pestilence[348]. Many of these fugitive villeins formed the class of “wasters,” often referred to in the _Vision of Piers the Ploughman_: “waster would not work, but wander about,” or he would work only in harvest, squander his earnings, and for the rest of the year feel the pinch of hunger “until both his eyen watered.” But it is clear that others went to distant manors, and settled down again to steady employment, freed from their bonds as _nativi_; and it cannot be doubted that some went to the towns[349].

In order to realize the causes and circumstances of the labour difficulty after the enormous thinning of the population, it may be well to recall the composition of the village communities. In each manor the arable land was in two portions--on the one hand the immense open fields (two or perhaps three) in which the villagers had each so many half-acre strips, and on the other hand the lord’s demesne, or home-farm. Part of the latter would often be let to free tenants, or even to villeins, who would count for the occasion as free tenants. For the cultivation of his demesne the lord was dependent on his tenants in villenage, who owed him, in form, so many days’ work in the year, but in reality were often able to commute their personal services for a money payment and are said to have done so very generally[350]. Thus the lord of the manor was no longer able to call upon his serfs to plough or to sow or to reap; he had to hire them for his occasions. The free tenants would also be dependent to some extent upon hired labour; and as some even of the villeins cultivated up to forty acres or more, in the open fields of the manor, these would also have to hire unless their families were old enough to help. All that labour for hire would naturally be supplied by the poorer villagers, the cottars and bordars, who would seldom cultivate more than a few half-acres, and in some cases perhaps none[351]. The lower order of tenants in villenage formed accordingly the class of labourers; and it was their demands which gave occasion for the ordinances of 1350 and the statute of 1351. In each manor the lord would have been affected more than all the rest by the scarcity of labour, in respect of the extensive demesne or home-farm managed by his bailiff. It is conjectured that he tried, in some cases, to go back to his rights of customary service from his villeins, which had gradually become commutable for rents paid in money, and that the attempts to do so led to insubordination[352]. He had to pay wages, notwithstanding all his rights of lordship. The wages paid in the harvest of 1349 were, says Rogers, those of panic. In the form of petition which brought the labour-question before Parliament in February 1351, it is stated that the wages demanded were at double or treble the old rate; of the year preceding (1350) it is recorded that the wages paid to labourers for gathering the harvest on the manor of Ham, belonging to the lord Berkeley, amounted to 1144 days’ work, on the old scale of commutation[353].

The labourers, although the lowest order on the manors, were accordingly masters of the situation. Personal service to the lord, measurable merely by days, and having no reference to fluctuations in the rate of wages, had become obsolete; nor do the ordinance of 1350 and the statute of 1351 give any hint of trying to revive it. If the men refused to be hired at the old rate, they were to be arrested and imprisoned.

There were, of course, many things besides the statute, tending to keep the majority of peasants on the manors where they had been born; so that the formal abolition of villenage remained to be carried by rebellion in 1381, while many traces of it in practice remained for long after. Those who stayed on their old manors, or removed to another county or hundred to become tenants under new lords, were able to get permanently better wages; the price of labour remained about forty per cent. higher than it had been before the mortality; so that the statute was on the whole ineffective. But another large proportion of the labouring class appears to have been driven to a wandering life. It is not easy to explain on economical principles why the class of “wasters,” of whom we hear so much, should have been called into existence. Hands were scarce, and wages were high; the conditions look on the surface to be entirely adverse to the creation of a class of sturdy beggars and idle tramps. But the economic conditions were really complex; and when all has been said on the head of economics, there will remain something to be explained on the side of ethics.

Not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were cut off in the mortality. A great part of the capital of the country passed suddenly into new hands. Before the Parliament of 1351 legislated upon wages, it was occupied with a number of technical difficulties about wills. Of the proving of wills and the granting of letters of administration on a great scale we have had an instance from an archdeaconry in Lancashire. In Colchester, a town with some four hundred burgesses, one hundred and eleven wills were proved[354]. In the Husting Court of London, three hundred and sixty wills were enrolled and proved from 13th January, 1349, to 13th January, 1350. An immense number of persons came into money who could not all have had the inclination, even if they had the skill and aptitude, for employing it as capital. If there were wasters among the labourers, there were wasters also among the moneyed class. The mortality produced, indeed, that demoralisation of the whole national life which has been usually observed to follow in the like circumstances. “Almost all great epochs of moral degradation are connected with great epidemics,” says Niebuhr, generalizing the evidence which Thucydides gives specially for the plague of Athens[355]. The fourteenth century was by no means a period of high morality before the Black Death; but it was undoubtedly worse after it. Langland’s poem of the vision of Piers the Ploughman is one long diatribe against the vices of the age, and some of the worst of them he expressly dates “sith the pestilence time.” It will be convenient to take these ethical illustrations, before we proceed with the effects of the mortality upon material prosperity and population, and with the domestication of plague on the soil.

So far from the labouring class being the chief sinners, it is in the humbler ranks that the root of goodness remains. Langland’s hero, the Ploughman, is obviously chosen to represent “that ingenuous simplicity and native candour and integrity,” which, as Burke says, “formerly characterized the English nation,” and, one may add, have been at all times its saving grace. It was in that class that the reforming movement, led by Wyclif twenty years after, had its strength. Lollardy and the Peasants’ Rebellion were closely allied. The grievance of the latter was that the gulf between the gentleman and the workman had become wider than in nature it should be. An ultimate and very indirect effect of the great mortality was to strengthen the middle class by recruits from beneath; it created the circumstances which produced the English yeoman of the fifteenth century. But we are here engaged with the immediate effect; and that was to broaden the contrast between the rich and the poor.

Luxury had already touched so high a point as to call for a statute against extravagant living, the curious sumptuary law of 1336 which prohibited many courses at table. Nothing could be more significant of its later developments in London than the sarcastic description, which fills an unusual space in one of the chroniclers, of the fantastic excesses of dress and ornament among the male sex about the year 1362[356]. Some of the names of the men’s ornaments occur also in Langland’s verses:

“Sir John and Sir Goffray hath a gerdel of silver,
A basellarde or a ballok-knyf with botones overgilt.”

These effeminate fashions actually led to a Statute of Dress in 1363, in which also the lower class are forbidden to ape their betters. It is perhaps to these hangers-on of wealth that Langland refers in his bitter lines:

“Right so! ye rich, ye robeth that be rich | and helpeth them that
helpeth you, and giveth where no need is. | As who so filled a tun of
a fresh river | and went forth with that water to woke with Thames. |
Right so! ye rich, ye robe and feed | them that have as ye have, them
ye make at ease.”

But, as for the poor, Avarice considers them fair game:

“I have as moche pite of pore men as pedlere hath of cattes, | that
wolde kill them if he cacche hem myghte, for covetise of their
skynnes.”

In London the preaching clergy are accused of pandering to the avarice of the rich:

“And were mercy in mean men no more than in rich | mendicants meatless
might go to bed. | God is much in the gorge of these great masters, |
but among mean men his mercy and his works. | Friars and faitours have
found such questions, | to plese with proud men sithen the pestilence
tyme, | and prechers at Saint Poules, for pure envye of clerkis, |
that folke is nought firmed in the feith ne fill of their goodes. |
... Ne be plentyous to the pore as pure charitye wolde, | but in
gayness and in glotonye forglotten her goode hem selve, | and breken
noughte to the beggar as the Boke techeth.”

The friars had lost altogether the enthusiasm of their early days:

“And how that friars followed folk that was rich, | and folk that was
poor at little price they set; | and no corpse in their kirk-yard nor
in their kirk was buried, | but quick he bequeath them aughte or
should help quit their debts.”

As for the monks, the same might have been said of them before; but now more land had been thrown into their possession by the mortality:

“Ac now is Religion a ryder, a rowmer bi streetes,
A leader of love-days, and a lond-buyer,
A pricker on a palfrey fro manere to manere,
An heap of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were.
And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cup bringe,
He lowreth on hym, and axeth hym who taught hym curtesye.”

According to Langland’s poem, the country clergy left their livings and came up to London:--

“Parsons and parish priests plained them to the bishop | that their
parishes were poor sith the pestilence time; | to have licence and
leave at London to dwell | and syngen there for simony, for silver is
sweet. | Bishops and bachelors, both masters and doctours, | that have
cures under Christ and crowning in token and sign, | that they should
shrive their parishours, preach and pray for them and the poor feed, |
live in London in Lent and all”--

some of them serving the king in the offices of Exchequer and Chancery, and some acting as the stewards of lords.

It is undoubted that the business of the courts in London received a great impetus after the mortality, as one can readily understand from the number of inheritances, successions, and feudal claims that had to be settled. Several of the Inns of Chancery date from about that time. Gascoigne, who was “cancellarius” at Oxford about 1430, and had access to the rolls of former “cancellarii,” was struck by the increase of legists after the commotion of 1349: “Before the great pestilence there were few disputes among the people, and few pleas; and, accordingly, there were few legists in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford, at a time when there were thirty thousand scholars in Oxford, as I have seen in the rolls,” etc.[357]

The country clergy, such of them as remained in their cures were a notoriously illiterate class; according to Knighton, they could read the Latin services without understanding what they read. Langland makes a parson confess his poor qualifications to be the spiritual guide of his flock; on the other hand he was not without skill in the sports of the field: “But I can fynde in a felde or in a furlonge an hare.” At one of the manor courts in Wiltshire in 1361, a gang of the district clergy were convicted of night poaching[358].

Such being the state of matters among the upper and middle classes, it is not surprising to find a lax morality among the lower orders. The ploughman is as severe a satirist of his own class as he is of the rich. In London we have a picture of the interior of a tavern crowded with loafers of all sorts “early in the morning.” In the country also the contrast is drawn between the industrious and the idle class:

“And whoso helpeth me to erie [plough] or sowen here ere I wende |
shall have leve, bi oure Lorde to lese here in harvest, | and make him
merry there-mydde, maugre whoso begruccheth it: | save Jakke the
jogeloure and Jonet of the stewes, | and Danget the dys-playere, and
Denot the bawd, | and Frere the faytoure and folk of his order, | and
Robyn the rybaudoure for his rusty wordes.”

To live out of wedlock was nothing unusual:

“Many of you ne wedde nought the wimmen that ye with delen, | but as
wilde bestis with wehe worthen up and worchen, | and bryngeth forth
barnes that bastardes men calleth.”

Ill-assorted marriages also appear to have been common:

“It is an oncomely couple, bi Cryst, as me-thinketh, | to gyven a
yonge wenche to an olde feble, | or wedden any widwe for welth of hir
goodis, | that never shall bairne bere but if it be in armes. | Many a
paire sithen the pestilence have plight hem togiders: | the fruit that
thei brynge forth aren foule wordes: | in jalousye joyeles and
jangling in bedde | have thei no children but cheste and choppyng hem
betweene.”

Chapmen did not chastise their children. Old traditions of weather-lore, and of reckoning the yield of harvest, were forgotten.

As a set-off to the uniformly bad picture of the times given by Langland, we may turn to the gay and good-humoured scenes of the ‘Canterbury Tales.’ But Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the cultured class, and it is proper to his muse to keep within the limits of a well-bred cynicism. Again, Langland’s strictures on the avarice and other vices of the rich may seem to be a mere echo of a very old cry, which finds equally strong expression in Roger of Wendover, about the year 1235, and in Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ in the year 1303. But the Vision of the Ploughman is too consistent, and too concrete, to be considered as a mere homily on the wickedness of the times, such as might have been written of almost any age or of any country in which the Seven Mortal Sins were still called by their plain names. The words “sithen the pestilence” recur so often, that this contemporary author must be held as sharing the belief that the Black Death made a marked difference to the morals of the nation throughout all classes.

More lasting effects on Farming, Industries, and Population.

Turning from things moral to things material, we shall find that the Great Mortality left its mark on the cultivated area of the country, on rents of land, on the kind of tenure and the system of farming, on industry, trade and municipal government, on the population, and, on what chiefly concerns us, the subsequent health of the country.

Corn-growing would appear to have met with at least a temporary check. Three water-mills near Shrewsbury fell in annual value by one half, owing to the scarcity of corn to grind[359]. Richmond, one of the chief corn-markets in Yorkshire, is said, on rather uncertain evidence, to have been permanently reduced for the same reason; besides losing an enormous number by the plague itself (vaguely stated at 2000), the town lost its corn-trade through the land around falling out of cultivation, so that some of the burgesses, being unable to pay rent, had to wander abroad as mendicants[360].

The general statements of Knighton, Le Baker and others for England (not to mention numerous rhetorical passages of foreign writers), to the effect that whole villages were left desolate, are borne out by the petitions recurring in the Rolls of Parliament for many years after. There are also some references to the continuing desolateness of particular places, which are probably fair samples of a larger number.

Thus a rich clergyman in Hertfordshire had given, just before the Black Death, all his lands and tenements in Braghinge, Herts, to the prior and convent of Anglesey, Cambridgeshire, in consideration that they should find at their proper expense a chantry of two priests for ever in the church of Anglesey, to say masses for the souls of the benefactor and his family. But on the 10th of May, 1351, he remitted the charge and support of one of the two said priests, on the ground that, “on account of the vast mortality, lands lie uncultivated in many and innumerable places, not a few tenements daily and suddenly decay and are pulled down, rents and services cannot be levied, but a much smaller profit is obliged to be taken than usual[361].” An instance of a long-abiding effect is that of the manor of Hockham belonging to the earl of Arundel, which was not tenanted for thirty years[362].

The history of rents is peculiar. The immediate effect, as we learn from Knighton, as well as from the rolls of particular manor courts, was a remission of them by the lords, lest their tenants in villenage should quit the lands. There was, indeed, a competition among landlords for tenants to occupy their manors, so that the cultivators could make their own terms. Of that we have had an instance from the manor of Ensham, belonging to Christ Church, Oxford[363]. But, after a few years, rents appear to have come back to near their old level. The following figures have been compiled from the Tower records of assizes made for the purpose of taxation[364]:

1268 9_d._
1348-9 --
1417 6_d._
1446 8_d._
1271 12_d._
1359 9¼_d._
1422 4_d._
1336 11½_d._
1368 10½_d._
1429 4_d._
1338 11½_d._
1381 9¾_d._
1432 6_d._

The great fall, it will be seen, was in the next century.

Perhaps the most striking effect upon agriculture of the upheaval produced by the great mortality was, as Thorold Rogers has shown, in changing the system of farming and in creating the type of the English yeoman. The system of farming the lord’s demesne or home-farm by a bailiff, never very profitable, became, says that historian, quite unproductive, owing especially to the permanent rise in wages. The small men who took the lord’s land to farm--they had been doing so to some extent before[365]--had not sufficient of their own for stock and seed; but they got advances from the lord, which were repaid in due course. It was a kind of _métairie_ farming. It prevailed for about fifty years, by which time the ordinary system of farming on lease was becoming general. Finally, and especially in the Civil Wars of the fifteenth century, much of the land which had belonged in fee to the feudal lords, passed away by purchase to the tenant farmers[366]. Thus arose the famous breed of English yeomen--the “good yeomen whose limbs were made in England.”

The effect of the mortality upon trade and industry was, momentarily, to paralyse them. Of the great wool-trade, Rogers, the historian of English prices, says: “Nothing, I think, in the whole history of these prices is more significant of the terror and prostration induced by the plague than the sudden fall in the price of wool at this time. It is a long time before a recovery takes place[367].” But from 1364 to 1380, the price of wool was uniformly above the average; and, if there be any accuracy in Avesbury’s figures already given for the years following 1355, the export of bales of wool to the Continent (100,000 sacks in a year, he says, each sack being a bale of the present colonial size, or weighing about three hundredweights) meant a very considerable amount of labour, tonnage and exchange. Among other articles of export, we hear specially of iron, in a petition to Parliament of 28 Ed. III. (1354); the price of iron had risen to four times what it was before the plague, and it was desired to stop the export of it and to fix the price[368].

The effect of the mortality upon the industries of the country was shown most in Norwich. That city was the centre of the Flemish cloth-weaving, which had been flourishing in Norfolk for some twenty years, under the direct encouragement of Edward III., and of a protective statute against foreign-made cloth. Before the pestilence, Norwich was the second city in the kingdom. In the king’s warrant for men-at-arms, which was indeed issued in 1350, but may be taken as drawn up on the old lines and irrespective of the pestilence, the quota of Norwich is rated at 60, London’s being 100, Bristol’s and Lynn’s 20 each, that of Coventry, Gloucester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Sarum, Oxford, Canterbury and Bury St Edmund’s 10 each, and of other towns from 8 to 1 each, York not being mentioned. But in the Subsidy Roll of 1377, which shows how many persons, above the age of fourteen, paid the poll-tax of a groat in each county and in each principal town, Norwich comes sixth in the list instead of second, being far surpassed in numbers by York and Bristol, and surpassed considerably by Coventry and Plymouth. So far from being in a proportion to London of 60 to 100, it is now in a proportion of 3952 to 23,314, its whole population, as estimated, being 7410 against 44,770 in the capital which at one time it bade fair to rival. It had lost heavily in the Black Death, and so had the populous district around it, where the Flemish industries and trade were planted in numerous villages. By 1368, ten of the sixty very small parishes of Norwich had disappeared, and fourteen more disappeared by degrees, the ruins of twenty of them being still visible[369].

There is no mistaking the significance of these figures and facts for the second city of the kingdom. At least one generation passed before Norwich recovered something of its old prosperity. In the fifteenth century it was still the chief seat of the woollen manufactures; the county of Norfolk kept its old pre-eminence, although rival centres of industry had grown up. There were, however, causes at work which at length reduced the capital of East Anglia to a comparatively poor state. One of the intermediate glimpses that we get of it--they are not many, even in Blomefield’s history--is the statute of 1455, to put down the enormous number of “pettifogging attorneys” in the city and county[370]. Its real decline was in the early Tudor reigns. When Henry VII. visited Norwich in 1497, the mayor in presenting the Queen’s usual gold cup with a hundred pieces in it, took occasion to tell the monarch “howbeit that they are more poor, and not of such wealth as they have been afore these days[371].” When the town suffered much from fires about the year 1505, the city of London raised large sums in aid of its rebuilding. To the same period belongs a municipal order that no one should dig holes in the market-place to get sand, without the mayor’s licence. In 1525, there was a general decay of work, the clothiers and farmers being unable to employ the artisans and labourers, who began to rise in revolt against the heavy taxes. An Act of 33 Hen. VIII. recites that the making and weaving of worsteds is wholly decayed and taken away from the city of Norwich and county of Norfolk--by the deceit and crafty practices of the great multitude of regrators and buyers of the said yarn. These evidences of decline in prosperity are in part long after the Black Death; but they seem to have been continuous from that event.

So far as concerns the other large towns of England, they did not all fare alike. The capital was more luxurious, and probably not less populous, after the mortality than before it. The chancery and exchequer business alone would have served to draw numbers to it; and we may be sure, from all subsequent experience, that the gaps left by the plague were filled up by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three years. Nor does it appear from the poll-tax that York had suffered to anything like the same extent as Norwich; while Bristol and Coventry became towns of much greater consequence than before the plague. On the other hand, Lincoln is described, in a petition for relief in 1399 (1 Hen. IV.) as being “in the greater part empty and uninhabited.” In the same year, Yarmouth has its houses “vacant and void,” although, in 1369, it is said to have “gained so much upon Norwich” that it was made a seat of the wool-staple. Other towns which figure in petitions to Parliament as “impoverished and desolate of people,” are Ilchester (1407) and Truro (1410). Camden instances the ancient borough of Wallingford, on the Thames, as having been permanently reduced by the Black Death, although the inhabitants, he says, traced the decay of the town to the diversion of traffic over the new bridges at Abingdon and Dorchester[372]. Some parts of Cambridge would appear to have borne the traces of the pestilence for a number of years after. A charter of the bishop of Ely, dated 12 September, 1365, mentions that the parishioners of All Saints (on the north-east side) are for the most part dead by pestilence, and those that are alive are gone to the parishes of other churches; that the parishioners of St Giles’s (the adjoining parish, near the Castle) have died; and that the nave of All Saints is ruinous and the bones of dead bodies are exposed to beasts; therefore the bishop unites All Saints and St Giles’s[373]. At that time the churches of those parishes would have been small, perhaps not much larger than the little church of St Peter still standing on the high ground opposite to the great modern church of St Giles.

These instances of the chequered history of English towns subsequent to the great mortality are not altogether favourable to the generality which has been put forward by an able historian[374], that the great social revolution produced by that event was to detach the people from the soil, to drive them into the towns, to increase the urban population disproportionately to the rural, to plant the germs of commerce and industry, and to determine that expansion of England which became manifest in the end of the Elizabethan period and under the Stuarts, the British nation being “doomed by its economic conditions to take the course which it has taken.” Many things happened between the Black Death and the expansion of England. The fifteenth century intervened, which was in its middle period, at least, distinguished as much by the rise of the yeoman class as by the growth of trade guilds in the town. But that which mars the generality most of all was the decline of industries and the decay of towns (London and Bristol always excepted) in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII.; the country had to recover from that before the Elizabethan expansion,--before the nation began “to increase rapidly in population until at length it should overflow the limits of its island home.”

At the same time, one effect of the great mortality was to mobilise the class of agricultural labourers, and to drive a certain number of them into the towns. Proof of that migration comes from the statutes and the Rolls of Parliament.

An Act of 34 Edward III. (1360) imposes a fine of ten pounds to the
king on the mayor and bailiffs of any town refusing “to deliver up a
labourer, servant, or artificer” who had absented himself from his
master’s service, with a farther fine of five pounds to the lord. In
1376 the “Good Parliament” makes complaint that servants and labourers
quitted service on the slightest cause, and then led an idle life in
towns, or wandered in parties about the country, “many becoming
beggars, others staff-strikers, but the greater number taking to
robbing.” More direct evidence of industries diverting hands from farm
labour is found in the various statutes about apprentices. In the Act
of 12 Ric. II. (1388) it is provided that “he or she which use to
labour at the plough and cart or other labour or service of husbandry
till they be of the age of twelve years, shall abide at that labour
without being put to any mystery or handicraft; and if any covenant or
bond of apprentice be from henceforth made to the contrary, the same
shall be holden for none.” A more definite provision of the same kind
was made in 7 Hen. IV. (1405-6): “Notwithstanding the good statutes
aforemade, infants whose fathers and mothers have no land, nor rent,
nor other living, but only their service or mystery, be put to serve
and bound apprentices to divers crafts within cities and boroughs,
sometimes at the age of twelve years, sometimes within the said age,
and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs which
servants do use in the same” etc.--the result being that farm
labourers were scarce; therefore no one, not having land or rent of
twenty-shillings a year, to bind his son or daughter of whatsoever age
to serve as apprentice within any city or borough. In the 8th of Henry
VI. (1429) this statute was repealed so far as respected London, on
account of the hindrance which the said statute might occasion to the
inhabitants of that city[375].

It may be doubted if, after the Black Death, the towns underwent any marked industrial development, except in such cases as Coventry and Bristol. On the other hand, the cloth-weaving of East Anglia was dispersed over the country, more particularly to the western and south-western counties, so that the west of England gained an industrial character which it retained until the comparatively modern rise of the cloth-industries of Yorkshire and Lancashire. But it was in great part a development of village industries upon the old manorial basis, as well as a migration of labour to the towns.

We have an authentic instance, and probably a typical instance, in the manor and barony of Castle Combe, of which the social history has been pieced together from the rolls of its manor court by one of the earliest students of that class of documents. Before the middle of the fifteenth century this village situated among the Wiltshire hills, difficult of access and almost secluded from the highways, had grown into a thriving community of weavers, fullers, dyers, glovers, and the like, with their attendant tradings and marketings, all upon its old manorial basis, and with its old agriculture going hand in hand with its new industries. There were free or copyhold tenants occupying their farms, while several clothiers and occupiers of fulling-mills held farms also, “driving a double and evidently a very thriving trade, accumulating considerable wealth and giving employment to a large number of artizans who had been attracted to the place for this purpose. Yet, strange to say, some of the wealthiest and most prosperous of these tradesmen were still subject to the odious bonds of serfship, adscript the soil[376].” It is clear, however, that the jury of the manor court took care that the lord should not have the best of it. The morals of this industrial village were, as might have been expected, somewhat lax[377]. At the same time the removal of nuisances was insisted upon by this self-governing community as effectively, perhaps, as if it had been under the Local Government Acts[378].

Another kind of effect than the industrial, upon the state of the towns, is exemplified in the case of Shrewsbury. The dislocation of the old social order had somehow touched the privileges and monopolies of municipal corporations and guilds, and given power to a hitherto unenfranchised class. The general question, besides being a somewhat new one, is foreign to this subject; but the reference to Shrewsbury is given, as the “late pestilence” is expressly connected with the municipal changes. A patent of the 35th of Edward III. (1361), relating to the town of Shrewsbury, recites the grievous debates and dissensions which had arisen therein, “through the strangers who had newly come to reside in the said town after the late pestilence, and were plotting to draw to themselves the government of the said town[379].”

It has been conjectured that population in the country at large speedily righted itself, according to the principle that population always tends to come close to the limit of subsistence. But there is reason to think that the means of subsistence were themselves reduced. We read of corn-land running to waste, although most of the references to desolation are perhaps to be taken as true for only one or two harvests following the plague. Again, it is undoubted that sheep-farming and the pasturing of cattle at length took the place of much of the old agriculture. It is not easy to make out when the change begins; but there are instances of rural depopulation as early as 1414[380], and the same had become a burning grievance in the time of cardinal Morton and the early years of sir Thomas More. It has been assumed, also, that the “positive checks” to population had been taken off, when they ought in theory so to have been: that is to say, after the inhabitants had been enormously thinned. The statement of Hecker, that there was increased fecundity after the pestilence, appears to be an instance of that author’s _a priori_ habit of mind[381]. What we read in an English chronicle of the time is just the opposite, namely, that “the women who survived remained for the most part barren during several years[382].” The authority is not conclusive, but the statement is in keeping with what we may gather from Langland’s poem as to ill-assorted and sterile marriages, and as to illicit unions, which, as Malthus teaches, are comparatively unfruitful. The alleged sterility is also in keeping with, although not strictly parallel to, the experience of crowded Indian provinces, such as Orissa, where a thinning of the population by famine and disease has been statistically proved to be followed by a marked decrease of fecundity. More direct evidence of a permanent loss of people occurs a generation after the Black Death, at a time when the circumstances of health were such as would explain it.

The poll-tax of 1377 was a means of estimating the population. The tax was levied on every person, male or female, above the age of fourteen. In estimating the population from the poll-tax returns, it is usual to add one-fifth for taxable subjects who had evaded it, and to reckon the taxable subjects above fourteen years as two-thirds of the whole population. On that basis of reckoning, the population of the whole of England, except Cheshire and Durham, in the year 1377 would have been 2,580,828 (or 1,376,442 who actually paid their groat each). The population of the principal towns is calculated, in the second column of the Table, from the numbers in the first column who actually paid the poll-tax, according to the Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.

Laity assessed for the Poll-tax of 1377 in each of the following Towns,
being persons of either sex above the age of fourteen years.

--------------------------------------
| Taxed |Estimated
| |Population
------------------|--------|----------
London | 23,314 | 44,770
York | 7248 | 13,590
Bristol | 6345 | 11,904
Plymouth | 4837 | 9069
Coventry | 4817 | 9032
Norwich | 3952 | 7410
Lincoln | 3412 | 6399
Sarum | 3226 | 6048
Lynn | 3127 | 5863
Colchester | 2955 | 5540
Beverley | 2663 | 4993
Newcastle-on-Tyne | 2647 | 4963
Canterbury | 2574 | 4826
Bury St Edmunds | 2442 | 4580
Oxford | 2357 | 4420
Gloucester | 2239 | 4198
Leicester | 2101 | 3939
Shrewsbury | 2082 | 3904
Yarmouth | 1941 | 3640
Hereford | 1903 | 3568
Cambridge | 1722 | 3230
Ely | 1722 | 3230
Exeter | 1560 | 2925
Hull | 1557 | 2920
Worcester | 1557 | 2920
Ipswich | 1507 | 2825
Nottingham | 1447 | 2713
Northampton | 1447 | 2713
Winchester | 1440 | 2700
Stamford | 1218 | 2284
Newark | 1178 | 2209
Wells | 1172 | 2198
Ludlow | 1172 | 2198
Southampton | 1152 | 2160
Derby | 1046 | 1961
Lichfield | 1024 | 1920
Chichester | 869 | 1630
Boston | 814 | 1526
Carlisle | 678 | 1271
Bath | 570 | 1070
Rochester | 570 | 1070
Dartmouth | 506| 949
--------------------------------------

That this indirect census was taken on a declining population may be inferred from the language of contemporaries. In the year of the poll-tax (1377), Richard II. addressed certain questions to Wyclif concerning the papal exactions of tribute; the reformer’s reply gives as the second objection to the tribute “that the people decreases by reason of (_praetextu_) the withdrawal of this treasure, which should be spent in England[383].”

In the political poems of the time there are numerous references to the pestilences and famines. One of these doggerel productions, “On the Council of London,” 1382, contains a clear reference to a decrease of the people:

“In nos pestilentia saeva jam crescit,
Quod virorum fortium jam populus decrescit[384].”

These general expressions in writings of the time will appear the more credible after we have carried the history of plague and other forms of epidemic sickness down through a whole generation from 1349.

The Epidemics following the Black Death.

Not the least of the effects of the Black Death upon England was the domestication of the foreign pestilence on the soil. For more than three centuries bubo-plague was never long absent from one part of Britain or another. The whole country was never again swamped by a vast wave of plague as in the fourteen months of 1348-49. Nor does it appear that the succeeding plagues of the fourteenth century, the _pestis secunda_, _tertia_, _quarta_ and _quinta_ were all of the same type as the first, or otherwise comparable to it. Disastrous as many subsequent English epidemics of bubo-plague were, they appear to have been localised in the North, perhaps, or in Norfolk, or confined to the young; and, above all, the bubo-plague became, in its later period, peculiarly a disease of the poor in the towns, although it did not cease altogether in the villages and country houses until it ceased absolutely in 1666. For three hundred years plague was the grand “zymotic” disease of England--the same type of plague that came from the East in 1347-49, continuously reproduced in a succession of epidemics at one place or another, which, by diligent search, can be made to fill the annals with few gaps, and, if the records were better, could probably be made to fill most years. Britain was not peculiar among the countries of Europe in that respect, although the chronology of plagues abroad has not been worked out minutely, except for an occasional province in which some zealous archaeologist had happened to take up the subject[385].