This article was originally published August 2023.
The coronavirus pandemic inevitably prompts thoughts of previous pandemics that have afflicted this country. In terms of the proportion of the population that died, and its social, economic, and psychological impact, the most devastating of these was undoubtedly the Black Death of 1348–9. Known to contemporaries as the “great pestilence,” this plague pandemic apparently originated in Central or Eastern Asia and then spread westwards into Europe along trade routes during 1347 and 1348. It seems to have reached England in June 1348, probably via the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset, then spread throughout England during the course of 1348–9, and then into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, before subsiding in 1350.
The Black Death comprised three related strains of plague: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic. The most common – bubonic – was carried by fleas on black rats and could therefore easily spread wherever rats and human beings lived near each other. The pneumonic strain was airborne and could be quickly transmitted from human to human that way. The close proximity of human beings and rats in the cities, towns and villages of lowland areas ensured that mortality was highest there, and somewhat lower in upland areas where the population was more scattered. There were further, less severe, and more localised plague epidemics in 1361–2, 1368–9 and 1375, and these outbreaks continued intermittently for several centuries until the London plague of 1665.
Even allowing for regional variations in the levels of mortality, the impact of the Black Death was truly devastating. At least a third of the population died, and in some areas the figure was probably closer to a half. During the early decades of the fourteenth century, the population of England had reached as many as six million after which it tailed off in the decades immediately prior to the Black Death. Evidence of the drastic reduction caused by that and the following epidemics can be found in the English poll tax returns of 1377 which suggest a population of only about 2.75–3 million. It remained at roughly that level, or even slightly lower, until around the 1530s, and it probably did not reach early fourteenth-century levels again until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Contemporaries felt themselves helpless in the face of such a disaster. Medieval medicine was at a loss to know how to treat the plague – the bacterium that causes it (Yersinia pestis) was not identified until 1894 – and measures such as bloodletting probably did more harm than good. Some people, convinced that the plague was a divine punishment for human sinfulness, even took to self-flagellation to try to appease what they took to be God’s anger.
Over the years that followed, the profound consequences of the Black Death became apparent in a variety of ways. It drastically reduced the labour force and this greatly strengthened the hand of labourers. Despite the Statute of Labourers (1351), which attempted to freeze wages at pre-Black Death levels, labourers were in a much stronger bargaining position. There is evidence that they would move around to find the best deal from employers, who responded by offering additional payments in kind such as food and clothes and other fringe benefits even though formal wages were limited by statute. A Commons petition of 1376 criticised this practice, whereby “encouragement is afforded to all servants to depart into fresh places and go from master to master as soon as they are displeased about any matter.” In general, labourers undoubtedly were better off and had a higher quality of life than before the Black Death. The chronicler Jean Froissart noted the “ease and riches that the common people were of,” and in 1363 a sumptuary statute was passed to control the style of dress worn by different social groups and to curb “the outrageous and excessive apparel of diverse people against their estate and degree.”
Those who laboured also became increasingly resentful of the restrictions associated with villeinage (a form of serfdom). The House of Commons claimed in 1377 that many villeins had “withdrawn the customs and services due to their lords, holding that they are completely discharged of all manner of service due both from their persons and their holdings.” A desire to break free of villeinage and serfdom in turn contributed to the causes of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the demands of which included that “henceforward no man should be a serf nor make homage or any type of service to any lord,” and that “no man should serve any man except at his own will and by means of regular covenant.” One of the major long-term consequences of the Black Death was that villeinage and serfdom gradually died out in England: although they were never formally abolished, by the early sixteenth century they had in effect been replaced by the emergence of tenure by copyhold or leasehold.
It is therefore no wonder that later fourteenth-century poets and chroniclers recorded an uneasy sense of society becoming less settled. They lamented the high cost of workers and the increasingly recalcitrant behaviour of the lower orders. Such anxieties were a central theme in William Langland’s “Piers Plowman,” or in John Gower’s “Vox Clamantis,” where the rustics “are sluggish, they are scarce, and they are grasping.” Gower lamented that “our happy times of old have been rudely wiped out, for a bitter day afflicts the present.” The “dance of death” became a central feature of late medieval culture, and many depictions survive of death as a great leveller, striking unpredictably, with no respect for rank. The victims of the plague included three successive Archbishops of Canterbury.
The story of the Black Death shows that the implications of a major pandemic are many, varied, and profound. They take a long time to become fully apparent and to work through. The catastrophe of 1348–9 changed people’s view of themselves and their world, and it greatly heightened their sense of insecurity and anxiety. Nothing could ever be the same again. It will be very interesting to see how things unfold in the case of the coronavirus pandemic. Certainly, its economic, social, political, and even cultural consequences are likely to continue to be felt long after the medical emergency itself has been overcome.
