The Black Death page 2

"In 1348 the plague raged to such a degree that the living were scarce able to bury the dead. The Gloucestershire men would not suffer the Bristol men to have access to them. At last it reached Gloucester, Oxford and London; scarce the tenth person was left alive, male or female."

In England, as in other countries, the disease attacked without distinction members of all classes and creeds, and the clergy were among the greatest sufferers, so much so, in fact, that often there was none available to perform the last rites for the dead. In one Cistercian abbey twenty monks and three lay-brothers succumbed, leaving only the abbot and two monks remaining; and this experience was typical of many other monasteries.

From the west country the plague spread rapidly in the direction of London, almost all the towns and villages in its path being involved. Some suffered greater mortality than others, but the havoc wrought in all of them was appalling. In numerous villages almost the entire population was carried off, while there were few towns in which the majority of the inhabitants survived. Burial grounds everywhere proved to be inadequate, and fresh ground had to be consecrated for the reception of the dead.

So few were the remaining inhabitants in most of the stricken towns and villages that the supplies of provisions were greatly in excess of the requirements, and could be obtained at phenomenally small cost. According to one account, horses that in normal times could not be bought for less than forty shillings were offered for sale at less than a sixth of that price, and good cows could be obtained for as little as two shillings.

In a little more than a month from its appearance in England, the great plague had descended upon London. The capital city suffered terribly from the scourge, which raged most violently during the months of February and March,

Parliament, which was due to meet in January, was prorogued by the special edict of Edward III, because, as he declared, "The plague of deadly pestilence had suddenly broken out in the said place and the neighbourhood, and daily increased in severity, so that grave fears were entertained for the safety of those coming there at the time."

London in the fourteenth century was a city honeycombed with narrow thoroughfares closely lined with low overhanging houses, and lacking a proper system of sanitation; it was a ready prey to attack by such a pestilence as the Black Death. Unlike the city of to-day, it had a large residential population, of whose size no reliable records exist, but of whose density there can be little question. And of the total number, at least half, according to a writer of the period, were dead within the passing of a few weeks. Hecker places the total mortality of London at 100,000, but several of his estimates have been shown to be under- rather than over-stated, and it is conceivable that he may well have erred on the side of conservatism in the figures relating to London.

From all the counties around London came the same frightful story of suffering. The towns and villages of Bedfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire were ravaged by the disease, as also were those in the counties to the east and south of the capital. On account of the inability to obtain adequate labour, agriculture and many other industries came almost to a standstill, and testimony of this is supplied by an old document which refers to a cloth mill at Storington, in Bedfordshire, which had to be closed down, the reason given being that "it stands empty through the mortality of the plague, and there is no one who wishes to use it or rent it for the same reason."

The county of Kent suffered in no less degree than other parts of the country. Records testify to its great loss of life, and to the fact that there was no available labour for the conveyance of corpses to the grave, the kith and kin of those to whom death came having to carry out the duties of burial themselves, a rite that lacked all ceremony, and consisted only in depositing the bodies in a common pit.

The midlands and the northern districts of England were no less immune than the south and west, and Wales, too, was made to realise the fatal consequences of the scourge, which also crossed the intervening sea and invaded Ireland. Records of its ravages in Wales and Ireland are scanty, but it is known that Dublin and Drogheda suffered great loss of life, the former's mortality being estimated at no fewer than 14,000. In Wales the pestilence raged most fiercely in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, but hardly any part of the country remained unscathed by its life-destroying onslaught.

The disease may possibly have overlooked Scotland had it not been for the ignorance of the people of that period regarding the danger of contact with those who were affected. Hearing of the ravages of the pestilence in England, which they regarded as a judgment at the hand of God, the Scots assembled an invading army in the forest of Selkirk, preparatory to an attack upon their inveterate enemy. But soon they were compelled to fight an unexpected foe in the Black Death, for contact brought the relentless disease upon them, and in a short space of time no fewer than 5000 of the soldiers were dead of the pestilence.

The Black Death levied an overwhelming tax on the people of England and Wales. No reliable records exist of the total population of the two countries previous to the coming of the noxious plague, but it has been estimated at rather less than 5,000,000, and of these no fewer than 2,500,000 are said to have perished from the disease.

Although the Black Death was a disaster which brought untold misery to the world, yet for those who survived it can be said to have had its compensating benefits. It marked the close of the medieval period, and the advent of the modern age, an age of new hopes and new aspirations, and, for the suppressed classes, it brought a great gift of which they had scarcely dared to think - emancipation, due to the great demand for healthy workers. The world, in fact, once more began to live, and joy returned to it.