THE BLACK DEATH.* A PERIOD of almost thirty years has
passed away since Mr. F. Seebohm, in a pregnant article in the Fortnightly Review, touched with surprise and censure on the neglect which history has shown towards the Great Pestilence of the four- teenth century. The battles of Crecy and Poitiers, in which a few thousands fell, and the results of which were wholly evanescent, are noted as the chief events of the reign of Edward III., whilst the terrible epidemic which raged in the interval between the two conflicts, and which slew at least half the people of England and France, is dismissed with scarcely a reference. And here, he adds, "is a striking proof how far history has been wiled away from her greatest task —that of recording the story of a nation's life, with all its throes and struggles—to become the were chronicler of Court pageants and the wars of Kings." Within the last few years something has been done to remove this reproach. The growth of the study of economic history has compelled atten- tion to the greatest social event of the Middle Ages, and the researches and essays of such writers as Professor Thorold Rogers, Rev. W. Denton, Rev. A. Jessop, and Dr. Cunning- ham have supplied a nucleus of valuable information. Yet until the appearance of the little volume now before us, no attempt had been made to give a definite and sys- tematic account, so far as our present knowledge goes, of the fearful plague which ravaged the whole of the known world, and possibly reduced the number of its inhabitants by one half, a result which undoubtedly ensued in Western Europe. It has been the custom to look upon contemporary statements as to the numbers who perished as gross exaggera- tions ; but the further research is carried, the less ground is discovered for rejecting them. Dr. Gasquet, admitting that to tell the tale of England only might induce a certain incredulity—although we venture to think the English evidence is quite incontrovertible—has given a rapid review "of the progress of the pestilence from Eastern Europe to these Western shores, and by this means the very distressing unanimity, even to definite forms of language, of writers who recorded events hundreds, and even thousands, of miles apart, brings home the reality of the catastrophe with irresistible force." The Great pestilence travelled into Europe over the prin- cipal trade-routes from the East. After devastating the countries of Asia, it was brought to Constantinople from Calla, then a large and important port in the Black Sea, and at that moment undergoing a prolonged siege by the Tartars. This was in the autumn of 1347. Certain Italian * The Great Pestilence (4.D.1848.49), now commonly known as the Mad Death.
By Francis Aldan Gasquet, O.S.B. London Simpkin, Marshall, and Cc. 1893,
ships carried the infection into the Mediterranean, and it very soon spread throughout its coasts and islands. In Cyprus, nearly all died. In Sicily, according to a particular account by a contemporary writer, the mortality was fearful. In Venice, breaking out about the same time, one hundred thousand people, or about seven-tenths of the population, are said to have died. At Genoa, scarcely a seventh sur- vived. On the sea, entire ships' companies perished, and the aimless vessels floated about, or came ashore, either to form fresh centres of disease, or to coasts where no man survived. As one reads the accounts of the horrors of the time, the lines in Campbell's "Last Man" come irresistibly to mind :- "Earth's cities had no sound or tread, And ships were drifting with the dead To shores where all was dumb."
In all the cities of Italy the fearful pestilence was soon raging. There is no lack of testimony ; but whether the writer be a simple monk of a half-buried cloister, a courtly chronicler, a gossiping notary, a literary man whose forte is narrative, a historian, a physician, or a scribbler of jingling verse, "all speak with such oneness of expression that it would almost seem that each had copied his neighbour." Of what happened at Florence, where the plague was so severe as to be known as the "Pestilence of Florence," Boccaccio gives a well-known description. At Pisa, at Padua, at Piacenza,, the mortality was fearful. At Siena, where the erection of the Cathedral was stopped, and never resumed to this day, one writer says,—" And I, Agricolo di Tura, carried with my own hands my five little sons to the pit, and what I did, many others did likewise." Barely a fourth of the people survived. From Parma, where Petrarch was then a Canon of the Cathe- dral, be wrote a heart-broken letter to his brother, the one survivor of a convent of thirty-five at Avignon, where Laura had already died of the plague. It may be gathered from contemporary records that "at least one-half of the general population of Italy were swept away by the scourge." Not a city, castle, town, or village, scarcely a house or cottage escaped, and when the wave of pestilence passed away, " the land lay uncultivated and the harvest was unreaped." Famine and distress followed in its track, great confusion prevailed as to property, and society was shaken to its foundation. In France the pestilence appeared first at Marseilles, which suffered so heavily as to be like an uninhabited place, and it soon advanced up the Rhine valley. One of the worst outbreaks, of which very particular records exist, occurred at Avignon, then the residence of the Popes ; and even in England this excessive mortality was noted and remarked upon. Lyons, Arles, and Bordeaux were attacked ; and ever spreading, the disease soon overran Gascony, Poitou, Brittany, and Picardy ; and in Normandy, where it arrived about July 25th, 1348, it was so virulent that the people in Picardy mocked those in Normandy. Paris, of course, did not escape. The population of France at this period was very great. Before the Great Pestilence and the Hundred Years' War, it was, Dr. Gasquet considers, " equal to what it is in the present century. Numerous villages were scattered over the country, every trace of which has now disappeared." Our author, indeed, is of opinion that, making every allowance for magnified statements, "Italy, France, and other countries of Europe were at the time more teeming with population than is perhaps usually understood." But whether sparsely or densely peopled, no country escaped the havoc caused by the Black Death. It fell on Spain and Portugal, and on Austria and Hungary, Bohemia and Styria. It crept over the Pass of St. Gothard, and passed down the Rhine Valley. In Switzerland and Prussia, Holland and Flanders, the pestilence was rife. To Scandinavia the disease is said to have been carried by a ship which left London in the summer of 1349. All the crew died of the plague, and the fatal barque being cast ashore at Bergen, the infection soon spread all over Norway, wholly depopulating certain districts. Even Iceland did not escape ; whilst the remote Scandinavian Colonies in Greenland were so obliterated that their sites were utterly forgotten. Whether from this point the Black Death was carried onward by wandering tribes of Eskimos, and thus finally reached and devastated the New World, we shall never know ; but there is nothing inherently improbable in the idea.
Dr. Gasquet has devoted the greater part of this book to the history of the progress and after-effects of the Great Pestilence in this country, where its dreaded arrival occurred early in July, 1348, at Meloombe Regis, then a consider- able seaport, in constant communication with France. It quickly spread over the South and West of England, and our author traces in considerable detail the advance of its ravages over these districts, and thence over the whole country. The absence of definite statistics is a constant source of great difficulty in dealing with mediaeval times, and in confirming the vague statements of contemporary writers. But in this case we are not without direct evidence of a very valuable character as to the numbers that were carried off by the disease. In the article already referred to, and which it is greatly to be regretted should become fossilised in the ponderous deposits of the Fortnightly Review, Mr. Seebohm drew attention to the value of the lists of institutions to vacant benefices by the Bishop in each diocese, which were the subject of most careful registration. These entries give the names of the parish, and of the outgoing and incoming incumbent, together with the date and the reason of the vacancy, whether by death, resignation, or otherwise. Some of these lists for the period under consideration have unfor- tunately been lost, but others remain ; and these, sup- plemented by the entries in the Patent Rolls, showing the grants and presentations to benefices in the royal gift, yield a fund of information as to large districts, whilst another source of knowledge is to hand as to particular localities. This is to be found in the Manor Court Rolls, in which was recorded the death of every tenant under the lord of the manor. and the name of his successor. Dr. Gasquet has examined this evidence at length, and by its aid, and from the writings of the chroniclers of the time, he has been able to construct a very full and valuable narrative of the fatal visitation. One-half of the beneficed clergy perished, and those who are best capable of judging have come to the conclusion that at least that proportion of the general population were slain. Where people were crowded together, as in monasteries and towns, there the mortality was worst. Many of the religious houses lost all but a fraction of their members, and never recovered their position. In all the large cities the destruction was awful; in Gloucester, Oxford, and London hardly one in ten survived ; Bristol, Norwich, and Yarmouth suffered in like manner. The story of desolation is, in fact, the same all over the land. It is to be remembered that the insanitary condition of things in the Middle Ages was something inconceivable. Wherever houses were grouped together, the soil adjacent was polluted with corrupting matter of all kinds. in wet weather—and the summer of 1348 was abnormally wet—pools of filthy water stagnated around, whilst in the dwellings, which almost in- variably had only rooms on the ground, the earthen floors absorbed every kind of nastiness from the rushes with which they were strewn, and which were only removed once a year, in an unspeakably foul condition. The mud walls, too, wore stained and soaked for a couple of feet from the ground with liquid filth. Under such conditions as these, the wonder is that any survived when such a disease as the Plague had once made good its entry. For there is no doubt that the Great Pesti- lence—which was not known as "the Black Death" until after the Great Plague of 1665—was a phenomenally severe and fatal form of the Eastern Plague. It had been known in England at least three times in the fourteenth century, before the Great Pestilence; a very severe attack in 1361 further decimated the people, whilst twenty visitations are recorded in the fifteenth century. In fact, it may be considered as endemic in this country until 1665, when it disappeared from Europe generally. But it was the magnitude of the calamity of 1348.49 which impressed men's minds. It was emphatically the Great Pestilence. Nor were they wrong. The Black Death was, as Mr. Seebohm finely puts it, the "great water- shed in economic history." Its effects were visible on every side, and they are with us to this day. It compelled a com- plete change in the tenure and cultivation of the land. Labour became extremely scarce ; the labourers all at once became masters of the situation, and learnt their power. For large tracts of land tenants could not be found, and land. owners had to farm it themselves. Without labour, it only remained to lay it down in pasture, and to make pastures valuable, the dividing hedges had to be planted, " which form now so distinguishing a mark of the English land- scape as compared with that of a foreign country." It left its traces upon the education, arts, and architecture of the country. All existing institutions were shattered by the death of over half the population. The ecclesiastical system was wholly disorganised, and had to be built up anew. In short, the Great Pestilence "was a turning-point in our national life." It, and not the battle of Bosworth Field, proved to be the true close of the medimval period and the beginning of modern times.
We have to thank Dr. Gasquet for a concise and workman- like treatise on this most important but neglected tragedy and its great and far-reaching results. We close the book with a feeling of profound thankfulness that it was not our fate to live in the days when the Plague was a frequent visitor to this land. The dread of the Plague, so often followed by dearth, can never have been long absent from men's minds. No wonder that constant reference to this terror entered into their common language and into their literature. To us, in these happier times, the petition may seem but little more than words, but in those days from many a worshipper, trembling for his dear ones, there can have been no prayer to Heaven more sincere and heartfelt than the supplication, "From plague, pestilence, and famine, good Lord, deliver us !"
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