The Black Death in London (8 page)

An illustration of how suddenly this misery could strike may be provided by a few examples from the wills. On 7 January John Palmer, a shipwright living in an area called Petit Wales on the waterfront near the Tower of London, made his will bequeathing his tenements to his wife Amy, and requesting burial in the churchyard of All Hallows Barking. Within twenty-four hours Amy had drawn up her own will, describing her as ‘relict’ of John and requesting that her tenements received ‘of her late husband’ be sold to pay her debts and maintain her son Alan:
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John had evidently made his will and died within the day. Enrolment of his will was delayed until Amy herself had perished, some time before the end of July 1349.

Stephen de Waltham, a girdler, made his will on 2 February, desiring burial in the churchyard of St Lawrence Jewry and leaving his tenement to his wife Margery, with the remainder of his estate bequeathed to his executor, Ralph Abraham. In the event, it was only Ralph who came to court on 9 February for the probate: Margery had succumbed within a week of her husband’s death.
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Johanna Amyel, daughter of a chandler, made her will on 8 February, wishing burial in the churchyard of St Botolph Aldgate and leaving part of her estate to her sister Cristina. By the time Cristina had drawn up her own will on 13 February, Johanna was already dead, and Cristina was to outlast her sister by less than three days; her will was enrolled on 16 February.
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The preparations that people made, most likely in the knowledge that they had already contracted the disease and were doomed to die, are also poignantly visible in the records. Johanna Elys, whose husband had already died, set out her will on 5 February, probably even as she suffered the first agonies of the disease. In it, she attempted to secure the financial future of her son and daughter, Richard and Johanna. She set out a share of tenements in St Bride Fleet Street and St Dunstan in the West between them, and made specific bequests of beds, pots and pans that each child was to receive. Finally, given their minority, she placed them under the guardianship of her own mother. Having done her best for her children, she died less than seventy-two hours later.
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In total, eighteen wills were enrolled in the Court of Husting between 20 and 26 January: a figure we might expect to represent a year’s sum had been reached in a week. By the end of February a further twenty-two wills had been added to the rolls. Among the dead were the Archdeacon of London, Henry Iddesworth; the rectors of St Margaret Friday Street and of St Mary Woolnoth; Thomas Crosse, the recently appointed dean of St Stephen’s Westminster; John Kelleseye, whose wife was to distribute the silver to the poor; and many others. Across the Thames, Lambeth lost its rector, John de Colonia, in February or early March.
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As with rich, so with poor. The bishop’s manorial court at Stepney sat again on 20 January, some seven weeks after the last session. In those weeks, twenty-seven of the bishop’s tenants had died, a rate of two deaths every three days from a single manor. The following court, held just three weeks later, confirmed that a further sixty-one tenant deaths had occurred, indicating that the mortality rate had doubled. Once again, families were hit by multiple deaths, such as the Bischops who lost John, the father, and two of his sons, John and Peter, leaving a sole heir, William.
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It is clear that by the end of January the toll was becoming unmanageable, even with the new Pardon cemetery set aside by Bishop Stratford. Boccaccio’s
Decameron
provides us with a vivid picture of the nightmare; Florence might easily be London in this passage:

the majority of [the poor] were constrained, either by their poverty or the hope of survival, to remain in their houses. Being confined to their own parts of the city, they fell ill in their thousands, and since they had no one to assist them or attend to their needs, they inevitably perished almost without exception. Many dropped dead in the open streets, both by day and by night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own houses, drew their neighbours’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses than by any other means.
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London has no such record, but the Register of Charterhouse, an early sixteenth-century document building on fourteenth-century records, describes how the ‘violent pestilence killed such a great multitude that the existing cemeteries were insufficient for which reason very many were compelled to bury their dead in places unseemly and not hallowed or blessed; for some, it was said, cast corpses into the river’.
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There is corroboration for such desperate acts as this: at Avignon early in 1348, so great were the numbers of dead that the Pope blessed the waters of the Rhone so that bodies carried by the river might receive at least a minimal religious ceremony.
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Some sort of solution to the problem posed by unburied corpses was urgently required, and it came from one of the king’s most valued servants and military men during the French campaigns in the 1340s, Sir Walter de Mauny, who was in the city at this time. As well as conducting the truce on behalf of the king, he had been a prominent knight on the field, an admiral of the king’s fleet, and a trusted servant of Edward in many other matters. For his services he had been summoned to Parliament as a baron from 1347. He was, in addition, the marshal of the Marshalsea prison throughout spring and summer 1349.
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Whether through piety or through recognition of the peril arising from numerous unburied corpses, de Mauny determined in January to greatly increase the size of Stratford’s cemetery to the north of the city. His first action was to obtain some land, undertaken between the foundation of the bishop’s cemetery in December 1348 and January 1349. He leased from St Bartholomew’s hospital ‘an enclosed space for the purpose of a burying ground for those who had died of pestilence, called the Spitell Croft at 12 marks per year’, with the understanding that he should be granted full possession when he could provide the hospital with property of equal value in exchange.
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Later, in de Mauny’s own words to the Pope in August 1352, evidence that the cemetery was assigned a specific role comes to light. The knight stated that ‘during the epidemic in England, he dedicated a place near London for a cemetery of poor strangers
(peregrinorum
) and others … and built there a chapel with the licence of the ordinary [Bishop Stratford]’.
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The use of the term
peregrinorum
is significant, since it indicates that the people for which this cemetery was established were not citizens, but were more likely the poor who had flocked to the city out of desperation or false hope, or were traders and visitors caught up in the nightmare.

The Register of Charterhouse describes how Bishop Stratford ‘assembled a great multitude and with solemn procession came to the cemetery site, dedicating it in the honour of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and the Annunciation of Our Lady’.
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The precise date of this consecration is unclear, but the cemetery was already functioning by 26 January 1349, when de Mauny obtained a licence from the king to provide support for its religious oversight. The licence allowed him to pass properties to the value of £100 yearly to a proposed chapel, ‘within the place newly dedicated for the burial of the dead by the city of London’.
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Geoffrey le Baker’s chronicle tells us that the name of the cemetery was Newchurchehawe and that the house of religion to be founded there was specifically for the burial of the dead.
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In Robert of Avesbury’s eyes, the cemetery was of considerable importance for the management of the plague victims. He reported that between Candlemas (2 February) and Easter (12 April), ‘more than 200 bodies were carried to the cemetery for burial almost every day’,
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perhaps some 14,000 over the seventy-day period described. How such numbers were transported to the cemetery is not specified in any document, but the chronicler William of Dene’s graphic account of matters at Rochester no doubt stood for London too. He reported:

this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no-one could be found to carry the corpses of the dead to burial but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard.
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Aldersgate must have witnessed a grim procession indeed passing beneath its arch, with a new corpse emerging from the stricken city on average every five minutes. The cemetery now lies under Charterhouse Square and the site of Charterhouse (see Fig. 3).
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The enormity of the disaster meant that some breakdown in administration was inevitable. On 26 January the King’s Bench, the principal court delivering the king’s justice and held in Westminster Palace, was suspended. Edward wrote to his justices in no uncertain terms:

Mindful of the terrible pestilence of vast deadliness, daily increasing in the city of London and neighbouring parts, we do not wish any danger to threaten you, your serjeants, clerks and the other officers of the said bench, nor the people transacting their business there. With the assent of bishops, earls, barons and others of our council staying at Langley, we have given instruction that all … pleas before you at the bench are to be held over from now until the quindene of [the fortnight following] Easter [27 April] … We wish you to institute a procedure regarding these writs to be returned at the bench so that hearings may take place without discontinuation or delay.
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In fact, the King’s Bench was not to meet again until Michaelmas 1349.

February 1349

If administration was under pressure, the evidence is very scant for any resultant breakdown of law and order. The only direct example arises from a case before the court of Possessory Assizes, itself closed after August 1348 until late 1349. This court, whose purpose was to investigate allegations of unlawful dispossession of property, heard a case on 7 November 1349 relating to events in February. One Robert de Walcote claimed that on 23 February five men had ejected him from his rightful hold of three tenements in the parish of St Leonard Candlewick Street by force of arms. The case proceeded until May 1350 when the court found for Robert; the defendants were imprisoned and forced to pay 100s damages. Two further cases of dispossession during the plague months (on 30 April and 25 May) were also heard, but these did not involve allegations of violence.
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In contrast to this meagre evidence, it is quite clear that attempts were made to continue the normal business of managing city and realm as far as was possible. The mayor and city aldermen did continue to meet, to hear pleas and to enrol charters and wills at Husting (see
Chapter 3
). On 14 February eight of the elected shearmen brought the ordinances for the government of their guild before the mayor, though six of those eight were dead or missing within weeks, as noted on the Letter Book itself.
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The infirm Archbishop-elect of Canterbury, John de Offord, had put before the city new ordinances, dated 13 January, for the future management of the leper hospital of St Giles to the west of the city.
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Manorial courts within the vicinity of London were not abandoned. The court at Stepney met on 10 February and reported a further sixty-one deaths in the three weeks since 20 January. The manor’s estimated toll for the whole of February – an extraordinary seventy-five deaths – was to be the highest during the outbreak, the plague peaking in the smaller vills making up the manor as much as six weeks earlier than in the city itself. Similarly, in the much smaller manor of Vauxhall, the court recorded eleven deaths between 1 January and 11 February.
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Commerce also continued at significant levels; for example, between 28 January and 5 February, the collectors in the Port of London paid, on behalf of the king, a total of £517 7s 9½
d
for 388 sacks and
I
stone (over 63 tons) of wool shipped from King’s Lynn to the city by the men of nine different merchants, several of them London woolmongers.
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Wine too continued to flow through the city. A curious case illustrates both the trade and the continuing determination to regulate it despite the plague. Guilliottus de Gaignebien and Anthony Macenoie, Basque wine merchants from Placencia, had set out from Lisbon with 261 tuns of wine in late January or early February. While awaiting fair weather in a port in Brittany, their ships had been impounded illegally by Thomas Dagworth, Edward’s administrator for that region. Dagworth confiscated the wine and had it shipped to English ports, including London, for sale for his own profit. The outraged merchants appealed to the king, who on 12 February commanded the sheriffs of London to organise a search of all wine cellars and other wine stores in the city to locate any of the missing wine.
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