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November 2004

Parish History Episode 43

After the Pestilence

1350. It had been planned to be a Year of Jubilee. Pope Clement VI had planned on repeating the Wonderful Year, the Year of Jubilee, that Pope Boniface VIII had proclaimed in Rome in 1300 (see the Signpost for January, 2004). Pope Boniface’s plan had been that Jubilees should only be held only once every hundred years, but Pope Clement saw the holding of a Jubilee as a means of raising the money to put the Papacy, now apparently securely settled at Avignon, once more on a sound financial basis.

1350. The Year of the Penitential Jubilee: to be held at Rome, not Avignon, for the Pope wished to emphasize that he still ruled Rome, even though he no longer resided there.. The Plague had, by this time, largely run its course in Italy, but few people - least of all, few pious, God-fearing folk - were on the roads. Not many came to Rome, and those that did spent little. Rather, they spent their time in prayer and confession - feeling guilty, perhaps, that they had survived, while so many of their loved ones had perished.

By now, in most of Europe, the Plague seemed over and done with. Most of Southern and Western Europe lay devastated. Plague still raged in Scotland, as also in Sweden and other Northern lands. It had not yet reached Russia, but it soon would. But for most of Europe the worst was over.

Twenty million dead, a third of the population of Europe, cardinals and kings and princesses, priests and merchants and peasants, all alike dead of the Plague: it was a disaster the like of which has never hit Europe since. A few years ago, we perhaps feared a similar disaster, if nuclear war broke out between the two power blocs which then divided Europe between them. Well, that cataclysm never happened. But, for the men and women of Fourteenth-Century Europe, it seemed that the Apocalypse had come upon them.

What did it look like in Houghton-le-Spring? It had seemed, towards the end of 1349, that the World was coming to an end. So many had died. It seemed that God had cursed His people, that the End must be coming.

And the misery was not yet over. Plague was to be succeeded by famine and scarcity. It was hardly surprising that, even where sufficient men had survived to till the land, they had neglected to sow the seed, not unnaturally believing that the Wrath of God lay upon them, that soon they would all be dead and that the World was probably coming to an End. Many husbandmen who had survived had anyway survived almost in secrecy, secluding themselves and their families from all contact with possibly infectious strangers, by locking themselves within their houses, and going no further afield than the well and their cottage garden.

But as 1350 and 1351 succeeded to 1349, men increasingly realised that life was going to go on: seeds sowed themselves in the deserted fields, lambs and calves and bairns were born, the Plague had all but gone. But there were not enough hands left to work all the land available, and much of it had to be abandoned to permanent pasture - some of it has never yet felt the plough again. Villages (like Yoden, which stood on the site of modern Peterlee) where all or most had died were not rebuilt and reoccupied, but were shunned - like the Plague; and left to fall into ruin, and eventually be obliterated.

Abandoned houses and fields would for long serve as gruesome reminders of the Black Death. It is said that for many years after the Plague had passed, a gaunt old man, the lone survivor of his village somewhere West of Durham, wandered from place to place, all over the Palatinate, searching for his wife and children, his friends and neighbours, only to be chased away from wherever he set foot, as a dreaded and unwanted reminder of the catastrophe that had overtaken the country.

A darker aspect came over the Christian religion, as men and women asked themselves, “Why has God done this to us?” Some turned away from the Church, and some, especially of those who had lost all their family to the Plague, and felt that they had nothing left to live for, formed themselves into eccentric troops of penitents, sometimes flagellating themselves for the sins of Christendom. Some turned to sorcery and the occult, and rather more turned to witch-hunting, and murdered, by law or by lynching, those whom they suspected of seeking supernatural answers to their problems. The Church eventually won most of its children back, by regulating the penitential processions, and by encouraging the hunting out of witches.

It was a great age of preaching, and wandering friars such as Vicente Ferrer in Aragon and Bernardino di Siena in Italy, both subsequently canonised, held vast congregations spellbound, and provoked them to pogroms against Jews, and to burnings of witches. In England, all Jews had already been deported or exterminated (again, see the issue of Signpost for January, 2004), and so a hatred of Jews was not prominent in the preaching heard in this country.

It is possible that the effects of the Black Death on Christian belief and practice have still not worked themselves out. Both Bohemia and Vizcaya had been spared the worst of the Plague, and it would seem that even to-day the Czechs and the Basques have, compared to their neighbours, a relatively unintense religiosity.

To tell the truth, however, the serfs of County Durham and hereabouts were not burdened with an over-nice religiosity, even though their communities had suffered cruelly from the Black Death. However, it would seem that - once, at any rate, the Plague generation had passed away - the after-effects of the catastrophe were felt not so much in psychological and spiritual loss, but in economic terms. In particular, a shortage of labour benefited the working man and his family.

In 1347, the population of England had been possibly over three million. By 1351 it was probably down to two million or fewer. It was not to return to its pre-plague level for possibly two hundred years. There was the same amount of land as before the Black Death, and almost all of it still had a legal owner, and that owner wanted hands to work it. Under these new circumstances, if a serf ran away from one master, he could expect a welcome, and even a gift of land, wherever he went. The hired man could ask his price for his labour, and if he wasn’t offered it he went off to the next village. As those who had died became forgotten, those who lived felt that things had never been better.

Of course, the serfs, legally bound to the soil, were not in such a good position to bargain for improvements in their living conditions as those peasants who were legally freemen. Probably most of the peasantry in Southern and Eastern England were serfs, but along the Welsh and Scottish Marches considerable populations of free yeomen had come into existence, paying rent for their land (or, sometimes, even owning it), and serving in a militia to guard the borders of the Realm. Feudal lords did not wish to risk their serfs (who were both valuable and volatile) in border warfare, and preferred to lead bands of free yeomen into battle. Probably most of the nine men who marched off to Neville’s Cross in 1346 had been freemen. It would be no lord’s loss if they had been killed.

So now, if such a free yeoman had survived the Black Death, as well as the Battle of Neville’s Cross, he was able, thanks to the severe shortage of labour, to demand, from the Bellasis family, or from other lords, an increase in his customary pay. And if the landlord refused to pay what he demanded, then he simply slipped away, and sought elsewhere for terms of employment more to his liking.

Legally the serf was not so fortunate. He was “bound to the soil”. He had no rights against his master, who could strike him or insult him, and for that there could be no legal redress. But if labourers were disappearing from the village, seeking work on farms in other villages, or in the towns, or down the coal pits which were being sunk in some areas, or aboard the ships which traded up and down the coast, and as the landlord knew that many serfs were also joining in this “flight from home”, and going to areas which were desperate for labour, and were so far away that they were confident that they would never be recognised, it was often in his own interest to allow the unfree peasant to commute his bondage for an agreement to pay rent for the land he worked.

But still, the landlord was in a weak position. He found himself both forced to pay higher wages for that labour which he required (because of the scarcity of labourers), and obliged to sell his produce at less than the customary price (because of the fall in demand, consequent on the appalling loss of life in the cities). A possible remedy was to give up working the land in the traditional sense. The wool trade was profitable, so why not sell his plough to the blacksmith as scrap iron, kill his plough oxen for meat, and turn his land over to sheep? One shepherd could work the same amount of land as two or three dozen ploughmen.

Hundreds of lords did go over to sheep-farming. And that meant that less corn was produced, and so the price of corn recovered. The only trouble was that those men who worked for wages now demanded more than ever, pointing out that bread was shooting up in price.

And so the Parliament in London passed the Statute of Labourers, appointing hundreds of local magistrates (six to ten for each English county), aware of local conditions, who would fix the maximum rates for wages, and also the price of bread and other staples. And this price-freeze and wage-freeze (to use terms from the Twentieth Century) was much resented, as the labourers believed that the price of bread was fixed too high, and the price of their wages too low: and that was to lead, in 1381, to the Peasants’ Revolt.

But that Revolt affected only the Southern counties, together with the richly-soiled, low-lying counties of the East, as far North as the East Riding of Yorkshire. The Statute of Labourers never applied to the Prince-Bishopric of Durham, and it was entirely inappropriate to the tribal conditions in much of Northumberland.

Of course the Cathedral and Monastery of Durham (“the Dean and Chapter” in later terminology) possessed great lands, and were suffering great losses because of the flight of peasants from the land. Bishop Hatfield saw the necessity of doing something about it, and Durham had its own Statute of Labourers, but it seems to have been even more ineffective than the London legislation. Stewards were ordered to make careful records of the duties owed by every serf to his masters, whether secular or clerical. If the status of a peasant was doubtful, the steward was ordered to empanel a jury to investigate, and if the peasant could not prove that he was free, he was to be assumed to be unfree, and the steward would then allot him to a manor which was in need of labour. Unfortunately, when this procedure became known, there was a tendency for any peasants who were not in possession of documents which could prove their free status to simply disappear from the estate on which they worked.

They could flee to neighbouring estates, and hope to establish themselves there, with the support of another landlord; or they could try and seek work in the new, deeper coal-pits which were beginning to appear along the Tyne; or on the ships that carried England’s coal and wool to other lands; or to the Cheviots, where robber chieftains, dwelling along the Scottish Borders, were always in need of fighting men. Thus in Durham the Statutes regulating labour were even more ineffective than elsewhere. Hence there was no need for a peasants’ revolt, and none occurred.