10. The Great Famine and the Black Death
Through the autumn of 1314 incessant rains cast a grey curtain over the sodden landscape. The village was not in great shape. The previous year the ‘Great Gale’ had blown down trees, wrecked fences, and taken roofs off buildings. In the spring hard frosts lasted through into a freezing April, with late flurries of sleet and hailstones, and ‘a high mortality of pigeons’. All this was followed by a hot dry summer baking the ground bone-hard, and the Kibworth accounts list extra costs for iron to repair broken ploughshares. And now there were more worrying signs. With the heavy rains the villagers had gathered a poor harvest with great difficulty. Winter ploughing had lasted through October, the ploughmen in their patchwork coats struggling to keep line and length on the furlongs in North Field with their wet clays and steep headlands. So more beer for the ploughmen, more fodder for the oxen and horses, money for new ploughboards. All of this was noted down with concern by the reeve, John Polle, to be entered in spidery brown ink in the court rolls, while the hayward and his dog (Talbot seems to have been the favourite name for haywards’ dogs at this time) looked on uneasily as dark thunderheads massed like mountains over Smeeton Hill and Gumley Wood, and the first flecks of snow gusted into their faces. It was going to be a bad winter.
In the village hierarchy the reeve Polle oversaw village custom and practice, exacted fines and negotiated with the landlords, the Merton fellows. From an old villein family, Polle had been elected by the peasants who all knew and trusted him. The hayward’s job was more hands-on, to supervise ploughing, mowing and reaping, counting returns on a tally checked with the bailiff. Medieval estate management texts recommended that the hayward be a man ‘active and sharp, up early and late’, who must have his eyes about him from the crack of dawn. Around his neck he carried a horn to blow for the lunch break and quitting time at the end of day when the villeins and their boys brought the ox teams back from the fields. In his pouch perhaps he carried a little pocket almanac made of folded pieces of stitched parchment, with simple pictures and diagrams: painted zodiacs, eclipses, weather lore, highlighting in red the saints’ feasts, the ‘red letter days’ that betokened auspicious times. The booklet illustrated the dates of the farmers’ year with jingles of folk wisdom and even listed bread prices, with different kinds of loaf – maslins, wastels and, the roughest and cheapest, ‘horsebread’. But it also gave thunder omens and harvest prophecies with pictures of flattened wheat, its human cultivators stricken by sickness and bedridden. On one page was a sinister image of sodden sheaves of corn and clouds where hooded demonic figures spouted wind and water from their mouths like streams of arrows. And above in doggerel: ‘Stormy summers mean wet autumns, and great mortality of young and old.’
Practical busy men with at least a smattering of literacy, the reeve and the hayward were entrusted with the smooth running of the system, the routine of the open fields, and with knowing the weather lore, the harvest predictions and the movements of sun and moon. They were the eyes of the community. At root all their knowledge and expertise, and all the labour of their fellow villagers, was simply to produce food: to feed their betters, and then themselves. And the last page of the almanac depicted their greatest fear, the dire symbol of ‘derthe’ – a golden knife on an empty table.
Signs of the coming catastrophe had been there in the preceding two decades, starting in the late 1290s with rising grain prices and falling wages, compounded by the demands of landlords and of royal taxes to finance the court and the armies for the king’s foreign and domestic wars. Even 7d-a-year villeins found themselves marked down in the national poll tax in 1307. England now was overstretched, an overpopulated land straining under the weight of too many people, 6–7 million, a figure not reached again till the eighteenth century. A husbandman’s song from around 1300 tells of too many mouths to feed: ‘I heard men upon earth make much moan … how he beth tired of here tilyyng … good yeres and corn both beth agon’ (i.e. have gone away). This was the mood in Kibworth too, bursting at the seams with extra people, adventitii – landless newcomers who threw up their hovels on common land and attached themselves to richer peasants to earn a crust and find protection, or simply to survive.
Behind all this was a deeper and much longer-term crisis, born of what we now know as climate change. Disturbing patterns of weather had begun to disrupt the routine of agricultural life, the ploughing, sowing and reaping, on which a largely agricultural society depended. The early fourteenth century was entering a little Ice Age, but whether these signs were read at the time as a long-term phenomenon seems unlikely. Perhaps the pattern is only discernible with hindsight, as we look back over the village records, the thousands of court rolls which have been investigated over the last few decades, those detailed accountings of profit and loss that trammelled the lives of the mass of medieval English people.
From Smeeton Hill the landscape today presents a very different aspect from that of 1314. The arable has almost all gone now: instead, fields of green pasture stretch to the horizon, in places still scored by undulating ridge and furrow left by the medieval ploughmen. Back in 1314 this was all open, bare and brown, with few trees and hardly a fence or a hedgerow: not the green and pleasant land of the English imagination, then, but a highly organized and regulated landscape shaped by the techniques of what we would call industrial agriculture. Below the hill lay the fields of Smeeton and Kibworth Beauchamp, and further to the east the three great Harcourt fields, stretching in a half-circle from north-west to south-east, farmed in rotation each year with one field alternating fallow. Each of the great fields was divided into hundreds of strips, counting, as the Kibworth peasants said in their local speech, ‘from sunnyside round to shady side’: that is, counting clockwise from the sunrise (in their dialect, solskift – a Viking word still found in farming speech in the East Midlands). Across these fields at ploughing time lines of ox teams marched slowly up and down, the boys running ahead with the goad, the men steering behind, ‘husbandys with their beasts and ploughs all in a rowe’. Not surprisingly, it then was the now proverbial ‘Piers the Ploughman’, the English Everyman, who was the hero of the growing tide of popular song and protest poetry in the early fourteenth century; for as the ballad makers said, on his shoulders lay ‘the mirth of all the land’. ‘Gode spede wel the plough’ then was both a proverb and a prayer, for the truth was, the whole community, the whole country, depended on it.
Walking into Kibworth Harcourt on the eve of the Great Famine, the visitor – a tinker, say, a horse dealer or a wandering preacher – saw about sixty houses with yards and long allotment gardens enclosed by the village hedge and ditch. In the north the ditch ran along a small stream which was dammed to make fishponds – an important supplement to the villagers’ repetitive diet of meat, bread, onions and ‘caboches’. On the north side of Main Street were the villeins’ tenements of typical Leicester mud wall and thatch. Between some of their gardens and yards was the infill housing of the last forty years when tenements had been divided and subdivided during the population boom. Walking further on down the street, the ground sloped towards the marketplace, past larger stone-based houses which belonged to wealthier peasants – a class on the rise in the fourteenth century, people who could afford a hall, a solar and kitchen, cattle barns and pig yards.
Beyond the bailiff’s house the village marketplace opened out at the junction of Main Street, Hog Lane and the Slang – the big droveway from the village to the open fields. Here on the line of springs that had first drawn settlers here in the Iron Age was the village’s main source of water: a well which was never known to run dry until it ceased to be used after the Second World War with the coming of a piped municipal water supply. Here in the marketplace was the communal kiln and the horse mill, a rough thatched mud-brick house sheltering the grindstones. Every Thursday the market stalls sold cloth, leather goods and shoes, iron locks, tools and farm gear. There were sea fish brought up the Welland from Spalding, sticks of eels from the Fens and salted herrings, ‘stockfish’ from the Arctic Circle imported through the Humber. There were luxuries too: saffron and raisins, pepper and cloves from Andrews the ‘spicer’ in Harborough, to be used at sheep shearings and harvest feasts. The small village chapel was close by in Hog Lane; the parish church of St Wilfrid stood alone on the ridge between Harcourt and Beauchamp. The village had two windmills, one on the hill to the north on the track to Carlton, the other on a Roman mound north-west of the village. All the peasants had an obligation to pay to grind their corn at one or the other of the mills. A new technology then, these were post mills, with a brick base or ‘tower’ supporting a two-storey ‘buck’ or mill house with grinding gear and sails; this was turned manually by moving the wooden tiller into the direction to catch the winds that blew over the open-field country.
In Harcourt there were now eleven families on free tenements, some of them descendants of freemen, the liberi homines of Domesday Book. Among them were the Peks, the Reynes, the Sibils, the Browns and the Polles. Some of these people were wealthy enough to employ servants and labourers, drawn from the increasingly poverty-stricken landless proletariat who lived at the margins of fourteenth-century society. The bulk of the village community though was nearly thirty customary tenants, villein families like the Godwins, the Carters, the Bondes and the Wades, the reeve John Polle, Roger Joye and Emma Gilbert.
Last in the Merton rent-book were half a dozen cottagers, smallholders saddled as they put it ruefully ‘with counte and cot’ – that is, with paying tax and keeping a small cottage but with no land. As we have seen, it is among this class of people that the first job descriptions appear in the village in the years before the famine: the miller, the baker, the carter, the threshers and ‘brokers’, and even the painter (John le Payntour). There was Alice, the village washerwoman, who did her work at the washing place by the marsh, laying out her washing to dry on the meadow. Even an apothecary appears as a witness to one document: he was perhaps the village pharmacist, who procured, mixed and sold herbal medicines, and who may be connected with Robert medicus – the ‘doctor’.
It would be a mistake to think such people were not familiar with literacy. Even Harry the Hayward had to read and count, as a moderate ability with reading and writing seems to have gone with the job; indeed, the path to literacy in this troubled century would be one of the paths to personal freedom. Numeracy too was essential in the running of the village, though the cumbersome Roman numbering had not yet been replaced by the Arabic system (Harry himself used an ingenious system of finger tallying). With its childlike pictures and rhyming doggerel the hayward’s almanac is typical of the shadowy line between illiteracy and literacy in the fourteenth century. The reeves, however, were often more accomplished. John Polle’s teenage son, Roger, who followed his father’s career path, was certainly able to read and maybe to write. His complaint to the fellows of Merton questioning his expenses suggests a local man of self-belief who could stand up for himself. Roger would be reeve for twenty years between the Famine and the Black Death and the account rolls produced in the 1330s and 1340s under his supervision are unorthodox in layout and expression, terse but masterly in their brevity, and perhaps even from his own hand.
So the Kibworth peasants were used to the written word and they knew the law was meant to work for them too. As their neighbours in Peatling Magna had angrily protested before the king’s court, defence of their rights was part of the ‘welfare of community of the realm’. They understood the implications for themselves of Magna Carta, the Forest Laws and the Provisions of Oxford (the first edict since the Conquest to be issued in English and to speak in their own speech to ‘this landes folc’). Simon de Montfort was still the subject of nostalgic poems and recitals in the noble families that had supported him, and perhaps in the villages too. The flood of popular songs and stories composed in English in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, England’s first ‘radical’ or ‘protest’ literature, above all put the peasants’ point of view – the perspective of ‘Piers the Ploughman’. So in the fourteenth century, radicalized by the peasants’ movement over the previous four generations, everything was up for negotiation. Perhaps this helps to explain why the massive blows of climate change, recession, famine and plague would eventually break down the old order.
King Edward and his ministers were not oblivious to this political wind; the rising political involvement of the rural proletariat and popular unrest were a major worry to the court and nobility. But the burgeoning economic and social crisis of 1314 the king did not foresee. In spring 1314 Edward assembled a great expedition to subdue the Scots, marching his army up the Great North Road with a host of 3,000 mounted knights and 16,000 men at arms. With them was a vast baggage train transporting the lavish tents, furniture, bedding and kitchen equipment that would be needed for his triumph. At midsummer, though, the campaign ended in humiliation at Bannockburn with the virtual annihilation of the English infantry force. In high summer as the stragglers fled south and the bedraggled king took ship from Dunbar, the rains that spelled the start of England’s plunge into disaster began to fall.
In Kibworth the news of catastrophic defeat in the north was followed by the rain-damaged harvest. The winter ploughing done as well as they could manage, the peasants then settled down to weather the coming storm as best they could. The heavy autumn rain, ‘almost continuous’ now, burst river banks, and broke dykes and embankments, and soon, inevitably, the chroniclers, like modern headline writers, were likening the weather to ‘Noah’s Fludde’ itself. After the rains came the big freeze and then in the New Year a thick blanket of snow, one fall lasting for three weeks when it was ‘scarce possible to get out of the house’. Spring 1315 brought no respite. Around Pentecost the rains started again and soon the pattern of catastrophe had set in across northern Europe as a whole as far as the Baltic Sea and the borders of Poland, where the Teutonic knights waged their interminable war on the Slavs. With grain overnight become gilt-edged, merchants from Tournai to Bodmin bought up any surplus they could lay their hands on, like share dealers before a crash. As the rains carried on into August, the court rolls for England note a large increase in felonies and runaways, and particularly in the petty theft of food, grain and animals. Because of this, on 1 August the Earl of Warwick took the unusual step of writing to John Polle and ‘the free tenants of Kibworth and others’ charging them to be ‘intendent to, and to render their services to the warden and fellows of Merton College as fully as they have done hitherto’ (perhaps this was at the request of the fellows – a copy of the letter is preserved among their muniments). The system was beginning to shake.
The Merton fellows’ own concern is revealed in their accounts bills that autumn as the famine began to bite and their villagers fell under increasing distress. Crime figures in the village were continuing to rise as the desperate poor stole food from the rich. In the Merton accounts the expenses survive from their agents’ journeys up to Kibworth: notes for travel subsistence, horse fodder, food and lodging from inns in Daventry and Northampton. Their trusted ‘man’, Robert of Gaddesden, made no fewer than thirteen visits in the first year of famine, twelve in the second. And very soon the fellows realized that gathering their customary rents was becoming impossible.
When Robert rode into Kibworth from Oxford in November 1315 he saw a sorry sight: torrential rains had again devastated the harvest and this late in the year plough teams were still out on the Banwell Furlong along the steep baulks by the Leicester road. In the barns behind the houses he found widespread sheep rot; the pigs had ‘leprosy and scab’ and on one farm the cows had produced no calves. Each deluge swilled a brown tide down Main Street, the ‘King’s road’, gathering in the muddy morass at the bottom in what the peasants called ‘the marsh’. Among the village people there was also the ‘flux’, perhaps typhoid, and many were bedridden in their soaking houses. The images in Harry the Hayward’s almanac were beginning to come to life.
On 28 November 1315 the villagers watched in apprehension as a comet left its icy trail across the southern sky, an omen seen across Britain as heralding the worst. That winter famine settled on Britain like a chill blanket, numbing its people. The December snows started with huge drifts, firewood was short and a second hard winter brought on a national disaster, which the 1315–18 accounts from Kibworth and many other English villages describe at the local level with compelling immediacy. As in modern famines in Africa the smallholders were the hardest hit. The surrender of tenements rose from an average of six a year to forty, as poor tenants gave up their strips, sold off gardens and then even their cottages. The final straw for farming people of course, then as now, was to sell off their animals and their gear. Such was the fate of many poor tenants up and down the country, dying as they had lived, in abject poverty. The Kibworth accounts, now in massive arrears, note the closure of a tenancy with laconic brevity: ‘Death duty nothing to pay because he had nothing.’ A farm diary from that year provides poignant details of the scenes that such people saw in their last days: ‘extra hoeing – so many thistles’; ‘peas fed to the pigs’; ‘a great mortality of doves … snow drifts everywhere’; and – a last optimistic touch – ‘roses late this year’.
In London the government had by now woken up to the scale of the tragedy, commandeering merchant ships to bring in grain from Gascony, Galicia and even Cornwall (which escaped the worst of the famine). In 1316 the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered the clergy to make solemn processions with the ringing of bells, the chanting of the litany and special Masses in which the people should atone for their sins and appease the wrath of God. For the rich there should be prayers, fasting and the giving of alms for charity to the poor. Pilgrimages were undertaken to the shrines of the saints of England to beg their intercession and prayers spoken in village churches throughout the land.
As always in such cases, there were high profits to be made out of the disaster. Merchants from Lincoln hurried down to Cambridge and Huntingdon, where there were rumours of supplies of surplus grain; dealers from York and Hull scoured the grain merchants’ inns in Bishopsgate and Aldgate while some London merchants even travelled overseas looking for the one big consignment that could make their fortune. The government too intensified its own efforts to buy on the international market as grain prices went through the roof, hitting the ceiling unheard of in Leicestershire of 40s a quarter – a forty-fold hike. In 1316 the royal proclamation fixing prices had to be annulled as the Annals of London describe: ‘the ordinance regarding livestock fowl and eggs should not stand because so few could be found on account of the derth and famine.’ Even the Assize of Bread was redundant now: for if a quarter of wheat cost 40s, who now could afford a ‘farthing loaf of best white’? In Harry the Hayward’s almanac all that was left was gritty ‘horsebread’.
In 1316 John Sibil turned fourteen and inherited the strips of his father Nick, who had died in the first winter of the famine (the college had administered his land for the first year while John was underage). Now in a soaking spring, according to the reeve’s book, John sowed his strips with ‘7d worth of oats, 18d worth of wheat, 4 shillings worth of peas and 4s-6d of barley’. On Kibworth’s heavy clays, allowing two bushels of seed an acre, it was going to be a thin yield. But with a widowed mother and younger siblings John was the breadwinner now.
This already dire situation was made worse by a devastating disease among the plough oxen. During the year a virulent cattle plague, which had started in Central Europe, ravaged herds from Devon to Scotland. The dreadful impact, both economic and psychological, comes out in an agonizing account from the time:
At that time there was a great famine and pestilence of humans, especially of the poor. But there was an unheard-of mortality among cattle which continued unabated for several years. And everywhere the poor animals stood still as if lamenting to the people looking on, howling as if in tears because of the terrible pain that gnawed at their inside … and then they would fall down and die.
Comparison with recent cattle plagues such as BSE and foot and mouth suggests a striking similarity between the Great Famine epidemic and modern outbreaks of rinderpest. Mortality rates among English herds probably averaged around 60 per cent and in some places they were wiped out. For a population already tormented by hunger, it was a horrendous blow. Between them the peasants of Kibworth had at least twenty plough teams, possibly as many as 200 oxen, and as many more cows and calves: in the autumn and winter of 1316 these must have been devastated.
In both 1316 and 1317 the famine and pestilence were exacerbated by outbreaks of enteric dysentery and typhoid which killed off tens of thousands of people. Writing in Leicester, Henry Knighton describes local conditions:
There was a horrific mortality of humans and a pestilence of animals throughout the kingdom of England; conditions were so bad that the surviving people did not have the wherewithal to cultivate or sow their lands, and every day they were burying as many as they could in improvised cemeteries … And so a great ruin seized the English people …
The numbed public response can still be felt in the protest poetry of the famine years. ‘Sorowe spradde over all ure londe’ wrote one balladeer, ‘to binde all the mene [poor] men in mourning and in care … Come never wrecche into Englelonde that made men more agaste …’ It would appear that 10 per cent of the English population died between 1315 and 1318 – between a half and three quarters of a million people.
The Great Famine ended in 1318 when, as a London chronicler remembered, ‘good yer come agin and good chep of corne’. The poor inevitably had suffered most. The Great Famine was remembered even more keenly than the later plagues of the century, for it left a deeper psychological wound. The merchants had still profited, and supplies had been there which might have staved off calamity had the government been motivated to move them quickly. There had been one rule for the rich, as songs of the time observed: ‘For miht is riht, and the lond is laweless.’ The famine had been an act of nature but it was also a failure of government and an indictment of the rich. At fairs and festivals over the next years ballad makers would enlarge on this theme of ‘the Evil times of King Edward II’ and the potentially far-reaching consequences of social breakdown. A distant mirror, perhaps, of our own time.
Though battered through the 1310s and early 1320s, life in the village picked up in the 1330s: the government’s poll taxes then give us an image of a community beginning to thrive again, a ‘fair field full of folk’ as Langland would put it. But this proved to be a cruel illusion: in fact, worse was to come. In 1347 Italian merchant ships brought plague-infected rats from Kaffa on the Black Sea to Constantinople, and on to the seaports of the Mediterranean. From its source between the Caspian and the Crimea a new pestilence ravaged the landmass of Eurasia. A Leicester man, Henry Knighton, who was a boy at the time, provides one of the most vivid descriptions of its arrival in Britain, with an electric sense of its unstoppable momentum: ‘It started in Tartary,’ he writes, ‘and from there swiftly passed into the land of the Arabs; then it entered the land of Greeks, and finally came to the countries of the Christians. And in the year of our lord 1348 … it first came into England … a great terrible and unheard of affliction …’
Kibworth Harcourt in 1340, before the Black Death: at its greatest population before the nineteenth century
The Black Death: 1348–61
Spring 1348 was uneventful in the village, the court books recording the usual round of community business. There were new tenancies to be approved by the Merton steward, Simon Pakeman; fines were imposed by the manor court for encroaching on strips, or for dumping rubbish in the public street, or for making bad ale. Adam Sibil died; he was one of the senior men in the village and had often served as pledge and aletaster (useful perhaps as several of his redoubtable kinswomen were brewsters in the thirties and forties). The reeve now was another Polle: John’s son Roger. He was chosen as constable in 1326, clearly tough enough (and canny enough too) to oversee law and order in the often dizzy world of peasant politics where neighbours’ frictions over minor strip infringements and building rules, or simply perceived insults, could flare up at any time into feuds. Roger had been reeve for the last twenty years, solid and dependable, but in 1348 he was accused by some of his neighbours of maladministration and when this was referred to the fellows of Merton he stood down.
That summer the Kibworth villagers celebrated the marriage of William Carter and Emma Cok. Will was a villein, the grandson of Ralph, who held seven acres in the North Field and a narrow tenement and garden on Main Street; Emma was a young outsider from Great Glen. After the simple ritual and promises in church (‘til dethe us departe’ as Emma had to say) there were the usual festivities: sprigs of rosemary and a wheat garland round the bride’s head; flowers strewn for their homecoming and a feast at Will’s father’s house with bride cakes and ale and a ‘great noise of basins and drums’. Taking with them the traditional mother’s gifts – a goose, a pot for the kitchen and perhaps even a chapbook if Emma could read – the newlyweds took a lease on the cottage next to William’s mother, Alice. But in the fine weather that followed the marriage, dark rumours began to circulate from the south coast, perhaps first brought by the Merton bailiff from the college’s estates in Surrey and Oxfordshire. Rumours of a new and terrible form of pestilence.
Contemporary witnesses agree that the plague first arrived with an infected Gascon sailor who landed in the little port of Melcombe Regis, in Weymouth Bay. The date was midsummer 1348, just before the feast of John the Baptist (24 June) according to the Grey Friars Chronicle. Ranulf Higden in Chester heard the same story, while Robert of Avebury gives 27 June, and at Malmesbury in Wiltshire they had 7 July. Hints of the plague’s creeping progress across the countryside, these differing dates reflect the times when the first signs of infection in human beings were noticed, not when the plague first arrived. Allowing for a period of incubation of six or seven weeks, this suggests that the fatal boat came into Weymouth Bay around 8 May 1348. From then it moved with frightening speed. By the end of the following year the whole of England was in its grip, 500 days to cover 500 miles. That it spread so fast was due in part to the new-found mobility of English society which meant even Kibworth peasants travelled great distances to buy and sell. The commercialization of English society was well-advanced by 1348, even in the countryside, and hidden in tinkers’ packs, merchants’ bales and clothiers’ wagons, the plague pathogen was able to race up the country at almost a mile a day.
Such an alarming pace must have seemed almost supernatural. Though the people did not know it at the time, the key to the infection was the bite of the fleas of the black rat. Fleas were something the peasants lived with every day and once bitten they no doubt thought no more about it after a good scratching, but after a while agonizing buboes began to appear in the groin and armpit. ‘These tumours were the first sign,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘Tumours that grew as large as an egg or a common apple, and from them this deadly affliction began to propagate itself through the body.’ At that point, although some survived, death usually came within three weeks: ‘These boils and abscesses on the thighs or in the armpits were the death bringers,’ wrote an Irish friar. ‘Some died frantic with pain in their head, and others coughing and spitting blood.’
By late 1348, the plague was wreaking havoc in the narrow tenements of London, by now the largest city in Europe, with some 80,000 people. Across the city and its suburbs ‘with the aid of certain devout citizens’ emergency measures were put in place to cope with the ‘innumerable numbers of dead bodies’. The city’s largest death pit, under Charterhouse Square, is thought to have held at least 10,000 bodies but was said to contain five times that number. The recent discovery of over 750 skeletons in a Black Death cemetery in East Smithfield, the first to be scientifically examined, has revealed a surprising absence of the elderly, with some 40 per cent being children, and a preponderance of young adults. (Strangely enough, this is the same profile of deaths in the 2009 swine flu epidemic.)
Once London had fallen into its grip, the contagion flowed out of the capital in all directions and soon became an inundation. By the end of 1348 it had spread all round the Cornish peninsula and up the Bristol Channel into the Welsh Marches and the Cotswolds (where the citizens of Gloucester fruitlessly barred their gates to keep it out). It made its way round the south coast and up into East Anglia travelling with merchant ships into the wool ports on the Stour, the Deben and the Orwell. In New Year 1349 undeterred by the cold weather it came by river to Sudbury and the surrounding manors, its path traceable in the court books and rentals of Earls Colne and little Cornard Parva (where six men and three women died – half the village). So remorseless was its advance that it seemed to some as if humanity was being stalked by invisible monsters – like the ‘Babewynnes’, the demonic creatures with bug-eyes, webbed claws and reptilian tails that populate the margins of their holy books, suggesting the vulnerability of their mental world. For to the fourteenth-century mind the world was indeed populated by phantasmal creatures, and the unseen was palpable and always threatening to burst over the threshold to terrorize the living, to snap them up, and pull them down into the abyss.
By Christmas 1348 the people of Kibworth knew that a monstrous jaw was closing on the open-field villages of Midlands England. Like all big settlements, Kibworth was surrounded by a ditch and hedge, a protection against wolves, defensible too against cattle raiders, or the outlaw gangs who plagued the Midlands, breaking houses at night. The constable and night watchman set bars on the road at the entrances to the village at night, on the king’s road to Leicester and on the southern track to Smeeton and Gumley. They could attempt to keep the plague out, as some had tried to do elsewhere, but they had to let in food supplies and they had to let in their own people, the breadwinners who worked away – men like Will Chapman, the small-time travelling businessman who worked between Kibworth, Harborough and Medbourne market, or Adam Boton, who traded with William Falconer the horse dealer and broker at Lutterworth Fair. And then there was Brown the draper who bought bales of cloth over in Coventry. By now further alarming news must have arrived from the college bailiff, for that winter the plague ravaged Merton’s manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire with horrendous losses: perhaps half the tenants died. Cuxham was only three days’ ride from Kibworth, and in mid-December Kibworth men were down in Oxford. In Harry the Hayward’s omen book, the page for January has dark hooded figures spewing poisoned arrows; and this verse:
The arrew smytes thorow the cloth
that makus many man wel wroth …
The Black Death seems to have reached the village around the beginning of 1349. It was a cold wet New Year and the villeins had to spend extra time out of doors hoeing thistles in sleeting rain, feeding the dregs of their malt and a part of their peas to the starving pigs. It is just possible that Roger Polle’s kinsman William was the first to die: his is the only death entered in the court book on St Lucy’s Day in mid-December, incurring no death duty ‘as he had nothing’. But the first death certainly caused by pestilence is recorded next door in Kibworth Beauchamp in March. Allowing for ten to fifteen weeks from the first infection, then time for the development of symptoms, and the course of the disease to death, this suggests that the first infective fleas arrived in Kibworth at Christmas 1348. Perhaps they were carried in clothes, or bales of cloth or saddle bags belonging to people coming back home for the festival. Or even with young Robert Church, who that December had made a journey to Oxford to plead in person to the fellows to be admitted to a holding of a few acres. Be that as it may, fourteen tenants’ deaths are recorded in Kibworth Beauchamp in April. In Kibworth Harcourt though the first list of the dead is not entered until the meeting of the village court on St George’s Day, 23 April, by which time the villages were in the grip of a nightmare. We have to imagine the dead rats in the streets and yards, sick villagers in agony with swellings and pustules; those suffering from pneumonic forms spewing blood; young children dying in their dozens; the desperate vicar, John Sibil, struggling to minister to his flock while knowing he was himself dying. While in a villein tenement on Main Street, the village midwife perhaps helped Robert Polle’s newly widowed wife Alice give birth to a baby son.
The court meeting was chaired by the new reeve, John Church, perhaps in the open to avoid the ‘infected air’ which it was believed one might breathe fatally when in close proximity to the stinking and swollen plague bodies. With his curates Will Polle and John Palmer, John (who had just buried his father) now recorded the deaths of the previous few weeks. Between the New Year and April, forty-two deaths had been registered; two more in the August village court (with another four a year or so later). Among the dead were many familiar names: the newlywed Emma Cok and her mother-in-law Margaret, old Mr Heynes (village clerk for the last two decades), the Clerkes, the Alots, Alice Carter, Agnes Aron, John Church senior, Agnes Polle, Rob Polle (whose ‘son is too young to inherit so his plot is taken into custody’), Nicholas Polle (whose lands were confiscated ‘because he is a felon’) and ‘Godwine’ – perhaps this is the reclusive John Godwine who had been tonsured without licence over thirty years back but had now in middle age returned to the village. It was a bright sunny late April in Leicestershire that year, but as someone observed at the time ‘it seemed then as if the world would end.’
The deaths recorded in the rolls are only landholders and tenants, so to this number we must add an unspecified number of women, a generation of infants and young children, and also many of the landless men and women, the piecework labourers, pea-pickers and itinerants in their hovels up on the village edge by the windmill field, before we can reach a full estimate of the death toll. Among the dead too was the vicar, John Sibil, and his sister Constance. In time of plague vicars of course had the most dangerous job, tending the dying, administering the last sacrament, and trying to organize help and care for the most vulnerable survivors. (This is one of the few jobs that can be pinned down across the country as a whole – vicars suffered about 50 per cent mortality.)
As a microcosm of the great pestilence, the story of Kibworth Harcourt in particular puts this great event in the sharpest focus: with approximately 70 per cent, and possibly more, of its population dying, the death toll is unsurpassed in any court roll so far examined in Britain for the Black Death. Why these figures are so astonishingly high is hard to say. Was it because the village was on the main Leicester–London road? Was Kibworth already a place with inns where outsiders lodged as they did through the late medieval and early modern periods? How did Smeeton in the south of the parish avoid such heavy losses? Perhaps in the end it was simply bad luck.
That April the reeve and manor officials of the village court tried to keep routine and order, as people often do when faced with an irremediable catastrophe. The college steward, Simon Pakeman, and the reeve went through the list of dead tenants, listed vacant holdings and then invited survivors to take on the empty plots, offering them first to the relatives of the dead if there was no legal heir, and then putting it to the vote. Amazingly tenants were still found to fill all the vacant tenements, with some survivors taking advantage of the situation to acquire more land on favourable terms, their bargaining position sufficient to dictate to the Merton fellows and get them to waive the entry fines. When no immediate member of a family survived, the villagers elected the new tenants from among rival bidders and claimants: a novel procedure devised by the court in the face of conditions which had never arisen before. Many more men were eager to acquire land, so for the first time widows found themselves under pressure to remarry: half a dozen in the decade after 1348, some subject to fierce bargaining.
As demand for houses lessened in the village, plenty were left empty and a number converted into farm buildings and storage barns. Small properties attracted speculative buying: William Marnham for example took on two cottages in 1351 at a reduced rent from Merton, and then in 1354 three more; perhaps William was using them for the produce of his gardens or renting to incomers. It was the first indicator of what the long-term social effects of the catastrophe might be.
In Merton library today, under the warm red wooden polygonal roof, the rolls of Kibworth accounts take us through the balance sheet, ‘the recknynge’ as they would have said in the fourteenth century, in the spidery hands of Roger Polle and Heynes the village clerk, and John Church junior. The names of the dead cover two crumpled and stained membranes, in faded brown ink; crossed out and replaced by a sharper quill in darker ink. To the total of forty-four tenants who died in 1349, if we allow wives and children and landless labourers, then probably between 150 and 200 people died altogether. Add the other villages in the parish, Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton Westerby (for which full accounts don’t survive), then upwards of perhaps 500 perished in this one small place – proportionally the highest loss known in any English village.
As for the disposal of the dead, the smell it was said ‘could not be borne as a man walked by the open death pits’. The new vicar purchased a triangular field out on the Harborough road which the bishop licensed for a new cemetery, as was done all over the country. There, village tradition says, the dead of Kibworth were interred. If other death pits are anything to go by, the survivors were so scared of infection from the dead that they even left purses full of money untouched. The mound is still unploughed today.
What chance did one have to survive, and what if anything could the village doctor, Robert, have done about it, if he was still alive in 1349? Despite the best efforts of fourteenth-century surgeons, including Guy de Chauliac, who survived the plague and wrote a book about it, the fact is that our medieval ancestors had no idea how the infection was transmitted. They could distinguish between the bubonic and pneumonic varieties; they could observe the swelling of the buboes in the groin, thighs and armpits (these were the lymph nodes – the first line of defence against micro-organisms invading the body). But though they must have seen dying rats everywhere, and must have noticed that as the rats died the rat fleas aggressively turned on their human hosts, the clues were never put together. That had to wait until the Indian Plague Research Commission of Bombay in 1905. Then as millions were dying of bubonic plague in western India, the British medical team recruited a leading entomologist, an expert on insects, suspecting a connection between human infection and the presence of dead rats in and around the plague houses. Eventually they were able to prove that the agent of transmission, the vector, was the rat flea itself. The black rat lived around medieval people, just as it did in the packed shanties of Edwardian Bombay; houses, granaries, barns and mills are its favourite homes, just as grain is its favourite food. The IPRC showed that infection was from rats to humans, not (as the medievals believed) from humans to humans. The rat flea is a bloodsucker; the plague pathogen, which has much in common with a virus, is created by a blockage in the stomach of the flea, which makes it mad with hunger and causes it to regurgitate fresh blood and faeces into the bite wound. In 50–60 per cent of cases the plague bacterium eventually succeeds in overwhelming the lymphatic system and then bursts out into the bloodstream from the buboes. When that happens the victim has only a one-in-five chance of surviving.
Investigation of the Indian epidemic and its aftermath also established how the plague spread so fast from the city into the countryside. The people who carried the infective rat fleas in their clothing or in their bags or bales of cloth were often rural villagers who worked away but who fled from the plague in the city and came back home for safety. The same no doubt was also true in 1348 in Kibworth.
In Kibworth the story of one villein family can stand for all its people. The Polles had served in the village hierarchy as reeves, constables and ale-tasters since Henry III’s day. Head of the family in 1349, as we have seen, was the one-time reeve Roger Polle, who was sacked by Merton for maladministration just before the arrival of the plague. In his late forties at the time, Roger lived a long life by the standards of the day: he died a peaceful death in 1369 having survived the Great Famine and the Black Death. His three sons, Robert, Nicholas and William, also survived the horrors of 1349 – a remarkable survival record for his household. Why, one wonders? Was it pure chance, or had Roger followed the later peasant wisdom about fumigating barns and houses and hunting down any rat as soon as it is seen near the house?
Roger’s wider kin though were decimated by the plague. Two of his brothers, Robert and Nicholas, and his cousin Robert died in the first Black Death of 1349 along with his cousin Hugh Polle and his kinswoman Mabel. The next year at the tail end of the pestilence Roger’s third brother, William, also died. In the 1361 outbreak his cousin William and William’s son Nicholas perished, while cousin Hugh’s son Will went in the 1376 outbreak. Of these other branches of the family, only brother Robert’s son, Nicholas, survived 1349 as a babe in arms. Young Nicholas lived till the end of century with his wife Felicia (born in the plague year; her name means ‘the fortunate’), but if they had children, none is known to have survived. Roger’s line then were the sole Polle survivors of the century.
The Polle family story is the tale of many families all over medieval England. They bred and multiplied in the boom time of the thirteenth century and entered the fourteenth century in great shape with four solid branches of the old family tree. But only sturdy Roger the reeve survived that generation. Of his three sons only Will and his wife Emma had children, and their descendants can be traced for eight generations in the village down to the seventeenth century, when the male line died out and the last Polle daughter married into the Clerke family. But not everyone is recorded in the Merton documents; some younger sons miss out because they left the village to marry and work elsewhere. In the Tudor period a Kibworth Polle became a leather worker in Harborough, where his kin thrived, another married the daughter of a yeoman farmer next door in Great Glen, and astonishingly some of their descendants still live in the area today, including one Polle who has returned to the ancestral home in Kibworth.
Back in modern Kibworth the bailiff’s house where they lived for a time still stands on its ironstone plinth, with a frame of fourteenth-century timbers in its central hall. In the sitting room it has what the medieval carpenters called a ‘dragon’s tail’ fanning out over the fireplace; and traces of soot in the hall roof which may be from the open fire in the days after the Black Death. There are surely few better examples of the tenacity of traditional English yeoman families, husbanding their patrimony in one small part of the countryside; loyal to what one Tudor testator in his will called ‘the dear familiar place’. Between the 1260s and the seventeenth century, in all their property dealings, the Polles moved only a few yards along Main Street – and then back again.