The Story of England, page 24
Such an alarming pace must have seemed almost supernatural. Though the people did not know it at the time, the key to the infection was the bite of the fleas of the black rat. Fleas were something the peasants lived with every day and once bitten they no doubt thought no more about it after a good scratching, but after a while agonizing buboes began to appear in the groin and armpit. ‘These tumours were the first sign,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘Tumours that grew as large as an egg or a common apple, and from them this deadly affliction began to propagate itself through the body.’ At that point, although some survived, death usually came within three weeks: ‘These boils and abscesses on the thighs or in the armpits were the death bringers,’ wrote an Irish friar. ‘Some died frantic with pain in their head, and others coughing and spitting blood.’
By late 1348, the plague was wreaking havoc in the narrow tenements of London, by now the largest city in Europe, with some 80,000 people. Across the city and its suburbs ‘with the aid of certain devout citizens’ emergency measures were put in place to cope with the ‘innumerable numbers of dead bodies’. The city’s largest death pit, under Charterhouse Square, is thought to have held at least 10,000 bodies but was said to contain five times that number. The recent discovery of over 750 skeletons in a Black Death cemetery in East Smithfield, the first to be scientifically examined, has revealed a surprising absence of the elderly, with some 40 per cent being children, and a preponderance of young adults. (Strangely enough, this is the same profile of deaths in the 2009 swine flu epidemic.)
Once London had fallen into its grip, the contagion flowed out of the capital in all directions and soon became an inundation. By the end of 1348 it had spread all round the Cornish peninsula and up the Bristol Channel into the Welsh Marches and the Cotswolds (where the citizens of Gloucester fruitlessly barred their gates to keep it out). It made its way round the south coast and up into East Anglia travelling with merchant ships into the wool ports on the Stour, the Deben and the Orwell. In New Year 1349 undeterred by the cold weather it came by river to Sudbury and the surrounding manors, its path traceable in the court books and rentals of Earls Colne and little Cornard Parva (where six men and three women died – half the village). So remorseless was its advance that it seemed to some as if humanity was being stalked by invisible monsters – like the ‘Babewynnes’, the demonic creatures with bug-eyes, webbed claws and reptilian tails that populate the margins of their holy books, suggesting the vulnerability of their mental world. For to the fourteenth-century mind the world was indeed populated by phantasmal creatures, and the unseen was palpable and always threatening to burst over the threshold to terrorize the living, to snap them up, and pull them down into the abyss.
By Christmas 1348 the people of Kibworth knew that a monstrous jaw was closing on the open-field villages of Midlands England. Like all big settlements, Kibworth was surrounded by a ditch and hedge, a protection against wolves, defensible too against cattle raiders, or the outlaw gangs who plagued the Midlands, breaking houses at night. The constable and night watchman set bars on the road at the entrances to the village at night, on the king’s road to Leicester and on the southern track to Smeeton and Gumley. They could attempt to keep the plague out, as some had tried to do elsewhere, but they had to let in food supplies and they had to let in their own people, the breadwinners who worked away – men like Will Chapman, the small-time travelling businessman who worked between Kibworth, Harborough and Medbourne market, or Adam Boton, who traded with William Falconer the horse dealer and broker at Lutterworth Fair. And then there was Brown the draper who bought bales of cloth over in Coventry. By now further alarming news must have arrived from the college bailiff, for that winter the plague ravaged Merton’s manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire with horrendous losses: perhaps half the tenants died. Cuxham was only three days’ ride from Kibworth, and in mid-December Kibworth men were down in Oxford. In Harry the Hayward’s omen book, the page for January has dark hooded figures spewing poisoned arrows; and this verse:
The arrew smytes thorow the cloth
that makus many man wel wroth …
The Black Death seems to have reached the village around the beginning of 1349. It was a cold wet New Year and the villeins had to spend extra time out of doors hoeing thistles in sleeting rain, feeding the dregs of their malt and a part of their peas to the starving pigs. It is just possible that Roger Polle’s kinsman William was the first to die: his is the only death entered in the court book on St Lucy’s Day in mid-December, incurring no death duty ‘as he had nothing’. But the first death certainly caused by pestilence is recorded next door in Kibworth Beauchamp in March. Allowing for ten to fifteen weeks from the first infection, then time for the development of symptoms, and the course of the disease to death, this suggests that the first infective fleas arrived in Kibworth at Christmas 1348. Perhaps they were carried in clothes, or bales of cloth or saddle bags belonging to people coming back home for the festival. Or even with young Robert Church, who that December had made a journey to Oxford to plead in person to the fellows to be admitted to a holding of a few acres. Be that as it may, fourteen tenants’ deaths are recorded in Kibworth Beauchamp in April. In Kibworth Harcourt though the first list of the dead is not entered until the meeting of the village court on St George’s Day, 23 April, by which time the villages were in the grip of a nightmare. We have to imagine the dead rats in the streets and yards, sick villagers in agony with swellings and pustules; those suffering from pneumonic forms spewing blood; young children dying in their dozens; the desperate vicar, John Sibil, struggling to minister to his flock while knowing he was himself dying. While in a villein tenement on Main Street, the village midwife perhaps helped Robert Polle’s newly widowed wife Alice give birth to a baby son.
The court meeting was chaired by the new reeve, John Church, perhaps in the open to avoid the ‘infected air’ which it was believed one might breathe fatally when in close proximity to the stinking and swollen plague bodies. With his curates Will Polle and John Palmer, John (who had just buried his father) now recorded the deaths of the previous few weeks. Between the New Year and April, forty-two deaths had been registered; two more in the August village court (with another four a year or so later). Among the dead were many familiar names: the newlywed Emma Cok and her mother-in-law Margaret, old Mr Heynes (village clerk for the last two decades), the Clerkes, the Alots, Alice Carter, Agnes Aron, John Church senior, Agnes Polle, Rob Polle (whose ‘son is too young to inherit so his plot is taken into custody’), Nicholas Polle (whose lands were confiscated ‘because he is a felon’) and ‘Godwine’ – perhaps this is the reclusive John Godwine who had been tonsured without licence over thirty years back but had now in middle age returned to the village. It was a bright sunny late April in Leicestershire that year, but as someone observed at the time ‘it seemed then as if the world would end.’
The deaths recorded in the rolls are only landholders and tenants, so to this number we must add an unspecified number of women, a generation of infants and young children, and also many of the landless men and women, the piecework labourers, pea-pickers and itinerants in their hovels up on the village edge by the windmill field, before we can reach a full estimate of the death toll. Among the dead too was the vicar, John Sibil, and his sister Constance. In time of plague vicars of course had the most dangerous job, tending the dying, administering the last sacrament, and trying to organize help and care for the most vulnerable survivors. (This is one of the few jobs that can be pinned down across the country as a whole – vicars suffered about 50 per cent mortality.)
As a microcosm of the great pestilence, the story of Kibworth Harcourt in particular puts this great event in the sharpest focus: with approximately 70 per cent, and possibly more, of its population dying, the death toll is unsurpassed in any court roll so far examined in Britain for the Black Death. Why these figures are so astonishingly high is hard to say. Was it because the village was on the main Leicester–London road? Was Kibworth already a place with inns where outsiders lodged as they did through the late medieval and early modern periods? How did Smeeton in the south of the parish avoid such heavy losses? Perhaps in the end it was simply bad luck.
That April the reeve and manor officials of the village court tried to keep routine and order, as people often do when faced with an irremediable catastrophe. The college steward, Simon Pakeman, and the reeve went through the list of dead tenants, listed vacant holdings and then invited survivors to take on the empty plots, offering them first to the relatives of the dead if there was no legal heir, and then putting it to the vote. Amazingly tenants were still found to fill all the vacant tenements, with some survivors taking advantage of the situation to acquire more land on favourable terms, their bargaining position sufficient to dictate to the Merton fellows and get them to waive the entry fines. When no immediate member of a family survived, the villagers elected the new tenants from among rival bidders and claimants: a novel procedure devised by the court in the face of conditions which had never arisen before. Many more men were eager to acquire land, so for the first time widows found themselves under pressure to remarry: half a dozen in the decade after 1348, some subject to fierce bargaining.
As demand for houses lessened in the village, plenty were left empty and a number converted into farm buildings and storage barns. Small properties attracted speculative buying: William Marnham for example took on two cottages in 1351 at a reduced rent from Merton, and then in 1354 three more; perhaps William was using them for the produce of his gardens or renting to incomers. It was the first indicator of what the long-term social effects of the catastrophe might be.
In Merton library today, under the warm red wooden polygonal roof, the rolls of Kibworth accounts take us through the balance sheet, ‘the recknynge’ as they would have said in the fourteenth century, in the spidery hands of Roger Polle and Heynes the village clerk, and John Church junior. The names of the dead cover two crumpled and stained membranes, in faded brown ink; crossed out and replaced by a sharper quill in darker ink. To the total of forty-four tenants who died in 1349, if we allow wives and children and landless labourers, then probably between 150 and 200 people died altogether. Add the other villages in the parish, Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton Westerby (for which full accounts don’t survive), then upwards of perhaps 500 perished in this one small place – proportionally the highest loss known in any English village.
As for the disposal of the dead, the smell it was said ‘could not be borne as a man walked by the open death pits’. The new vicar purchased a triangular field out on the Harborough road which the bishop licensed for a new cemetery, as was done all over the country. There, village tradition says, the dead of Kibworth were interred. If other death pits are anything to go by, the survivors were so scared of infection from the dead that they even left purses full of money untouched. The mound is still unploughed today.
What chance did one have to survive, and what if anything could the village doctor, Robert, have done about it, if he was still alive in 1349? Despite the best efforts of fourteenth-century surgeons, including Guy de Chauliac, who survived the plague and wrote a book about it, the fact is that our medieval ancestors had no idea how the infection was transmitted. They could distinguish between the bubonic and pneumonic varieties; they could observe the swelling of the buboes in the groin, thighs and armpits (these were the lymph nodes – the first line of defence against micro-organisms invading the body). But though they must have seen dying rats everywhere, and must have noticed that as the rats died the rat fleas aggressively turned on their human hosts, the clues were never put together. That had to wait until the Indian Plague Research Commission of Bombay in 1905. Then as millions were dying of bubonic plague in western India, the British medical team recruited a leading entomologist, an expert on insects, suspecting a connection between human infection and the presence of dead rats in and around the plague houses. Eventually they were able to prove that the agent of transmission, the vector, was the rat flea itself. The black rat lived around medieval people, just as it did in the packed shanties of Edwardian Bombay; houses, granaries, barns and mills are its favourite homes, just as grain is its favourite food. The IPRC showed that infection was from rats to humans, not (as the medievals believed) from humans to humans. The rat flea is a bloodsucker; the plague pathogen, which has much in common with a virus, is created by a blockage in the stomach of the flea, which makes it mad with hunger and causes it to regurgitate fresh blood and faeces into the bite wound. In 50–60 per cent of cases the plague bacterium eventually succeeds in overwhelming the lymphatic system and then bursts out into the bloodstream from the buboes. When that happens the victim has only a one-in-five chance of surviving.
Investigation of the Indian epidemic and its aftermath also established how the plague spread so fast from the city into the countryside. The people who carried the infective rat fleas in their clothing or in their bags or bales of cloth were often rural villagers who worked away but who fled from the plague in the city and came back home for safety. The same no doubt was also true in 1348 in Kibworth.
In Kibworth the story of one villein family can stand for all its people. The Polles had served in the village hierarchy as reeves, constables and ale-tasters since Henry III’s day. Head of the family in 1349, as we have seen, was the one-time reeve Roger Polle, who was sacked by Merton for maladministration just before the arrival of the plague. In his late forties at the time, Roger lived a long life by the standards of the day: he died a peaceful death in 1369 having survived the Great Famine and the Black Death. His three sons, Robert, Nicholas and William, also survived the horrors of 1349 – a remarkable survival record for his household. Why, one wonders? Was it pure chance, or had Roger followed the later peasant wisdom about fumigating barns and houses and hunting down any rat as soon as it is seen near the house?
Roger’s wider kin though were decimated by the plague. Two of his brothers, Robert and Nicholas, and his cousin Robert died in the first Black Death of 1349 along with his cousin Hugh Polle and his kinswoman Mabel. The next year at the tail end of the pestilence Roger’s third brother, William, also died. In the 1361 outbreak his cousin William and William’s son Nicholas perished, while cousin Hugh’s son Will went in the 1376 outbreak. Of these other branches of the family, only brother Robert’s son, Nicholas, survived 1349 as a babe in arms. Young Nicholas lived till the end of century with his wife Felicia (born in the plague year; her name means ‘the fortunate’), but if they had children, none is known to have survived. Roger’s line then were the sole Polle survivors of the century.
The Polle family story is the tale of many families all over medieval England. They bred and multiplied in the boom time of the thirteenth century and entered the fourteenth century in great shape with four solid branches of the old family tree. But only sturdy Roger the reeve survived that generation. Of his three sons only Will and his wife Emma had children, and their descendants can be traced for eight generations in the village down to the seventeenth century, when the male line died out and the last Polle daughter married into the Clerke family. But not everyone is recorded in the Merton documents; some younger sons miss out because they left the village to marry and work elsewhere. In the Tudor period a Kibworth Polle became a leather worker in Harborough, where his kin thrived, another married the daughter of a yeoman farmer next door in Great Glen, and astonishingly some of their descendants still live in the area today, including one Polle who has returned to the ancestral home in Kibworth.
Back in modern Kibworth the bailiff’s house where they lived for a time still stands on its ironstone plinth, with a frame of fourteenth-century timbers in its central hall. In the sitting room it has what the medieval carpenters called a ‘dragon’s tail’ fanning out over the fireplace; and traces of soot in the hall roof which may be from the open fire in the days after the Black Death. There are surely few better examples of the tenacity of traditional English yeoman families, husbanding their patrimony in one small part of the countryside; loyal to what one Tudor testator in his will called ‘the dear familiar place’. Between the 1260s and the seventeenth century, in all their property dealings, the Polles moved only a few yards along Main Street – and then back again.
11. Rebels and Heretics
After the huge disruption of the Black Death it would be easy to focus on the material life of the villagers, to look at the economy and labour relations in order to explain the dramatic transformations that now took place in English society. But there was a deeper reaction to famine and plague which became apparent in the next few decades: in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, we can see the first signs of the spiritual, religious and psychological changes that would play their part in changing England from a Catholic to a Protestant state, and from a feudal communal order to a capitalist secular society – the first country in the world to be so.
