The English summer of 1348 was wet, but in defiance of the weather the country fairly blazed with glory. The king had returned to England in October the previous year in triumph. Calais had been taken. French advances in Gascony were stemmed. Philip VI had been humiliated on the battlefield and in the diplomatic meetings that led to a year-long truce. The Scots had been smashed.
The family and the country celebrated in style. Pageantry and festivities had been in full swing since Christmas, when the court had dressed in outlandish masks and costumes. Aristocratic revellers paraded before one another disguised as rabbits, dragons, pheasants and swans, while the king and his knights dressed in great green robes and peacock feathers. Once Christmas was over, a calendar of tournaments was organized. Jousts and romantic plays and games were held at Reading, Bury St Edmunds, Lichfield, Eltham, Windsor, Canterbury and Westminster between February and September.
At each tournament, the king paid close attention to the glamour of the spectacle. Occasionally it was surreal. Always it was lavish, with the royal family appearing in fine robes of purple, dazzling with pearls and diamonds sewn in intricate patterns on their sleeves and chests. At one tournament the king dressed as a giant bird, at another he decked his team out in matching blue-and-white uniforms, perhaps to recall the fleur-de-lis he had appropriated from the French arms. At Lichfield he fought under the arms of one of his veteran knights, Sir Thomas Bradeston: a lavish chivalrous display of faux-humility and comradeship.
A love of chivalry and showmanship lay at the heart of Edward’s whole being, and he made sure to parade his famous prisoners in high style: King David II of Scotland and all the captive nobility of Paris were given fine clothes and bathed in the warm munificence of the king’s generosity.
The centrepiece was Edward’s large royal family, which was maturing even as it continued to multiply. Although Edward was only thirty-five and Queen Philippa two years younger, they already had nine children. They ranged from the Black Prince who, at eighteen, was now an adult and a war hero, a warrior to his bones, to William of Windsor, a babe-in-arms who was born in June but would not live to adulthood.
The Black Prince had played a full political and military role in the wars. He basked in his father’s affections, stepping into the vacuum that was left in the king’s life following the injury and subsequent death of William Montagu earl of Salisbury in a jousting match in 1343. For the time being, he was the only one of the king’s sons who was of martial age. Lionel of Antwerp was nine, John of Gaunt eight and Edmund of Langley seven. (One further boy, Thomas of Woodstock, would be born in 1355.) Four girls made up the huge Plantagenet brood. Isabella (sixteen) and Joan (fifteen) had grown up in the same household as the Black Prince, with their cousin Joan of Kent; Mary and Margaret, three and two respectively, were toddlers in 1348, but had illustrious marriages in store.
Having begun his drive for European glory by war with France, Edward had in the late 1340s begun to add another strand to his strategy: he planned to knit the family deeper into the fabric of European aristocracy through contracting dynastic matches for his children. No Plantagenet king since Henry II had sired so many children who grew to adulthood. Although Lionel of Antwerp had been betrothed at just three years old to an heir to the earldom of Ulster, Edward saw opportunities further afield for his children – particularly the girls.
So it was that as the tournament season reached its peak in August 1348, his second daughter Joan prepared to take her leave of the family and begin a new life as bride to Peter, son of King Alfonso XI of Castile. The Plantagenets had roots in Castile: Henry II’s daughter Eleanor had been married to Alfonso VII, and her granddaughter, also named Eleanor, had been returned to England as beloved queen consort to Edward I. It was an illustrious marriage that beckoned for the fifteen-year-old Joan, and the preparations for her departure were made with appropriate ostentation.
The young girl was dispatched from Portsmouth with four ships to carry her attendants and belongings. The wedding dress designed for the princess gives us a clue as to the astonishing splendour in which she was expected to represent her dynasty: Joan was to be married in a gown made from 450 feet of rakematiz – luxurious, thick silk interwoven with strands of golden thread.
The ships were heavily armed. The arrival of an English princess in Bordeaux – where she was to disembark before travelling south to Castile – was intended to remind Aquitaine of the immense power of the erstwhile duke-king. Aboard the ships were a talented Spanish minstrel sent as a pre-wedding gift by the groom, two senior royal officials and 100 royal archers. The chapel ornaments aboard Joan’s ship bore decorations of fearsome fighting dragons. There may have been a truce in operation, but the Channel and Gascony were still war zones, and it was as well to remind onlookers of England’s military muscle.
But when Joan arrived at Bordeaux, splendour and finery entered a town in the grip of an uncaring beast. The mayor, Raymond de Bisquale, stood at the harbour waiting anxiously for his guests to arrive. The moment Joan’s ships hove in sight he issued a dire warning to the passengers and crews. The town was in the grip of a deadly plague. It was not safe for the royal party to enter.
Everyone aboard the ships would already have known of the disease that had swept, in little more than three years, from the Asian steppe to the heart of Europe. The Continent was already reeling from the effects. The French called it la très grande mortalité. The English version was a direct translation: the huge mortalyte. It was a very literal description of the disease that historians since the sixteenth century have called the Black Death. Its coming, against the background of the consuming, vicious Valois–Plantagenet war, would transform medieval lives and minds. War slaughtered tens of thousands along the villages of the Seine, among the vineyards of Bordeaux, before the forest of Crécy and in front of the gates of Calais. The Black Death would annihilate millions, with no regard for where it found them.
Already, the plague had ripped through Cyprus, Sicily, the Holy Land and the Italian states. It reached France through Marseille and spread north and south at an unstoppable, inescapable pace. It slashed south through Aragon towards Castile and north to Rouen and Paris, from where Philip VI fled. (His queen, Joan the Lame of Burgundy, would die of plague on 12 September.) Black flags were raised over villages as the disease reached them. Warning off visitors was the only precaution possible.
This was what Mayor Bisquale was attempting to do when Joan’s ships pulled in. But the royal party were not interested. His warnings were brushed aside. The English party had come from a country untouched as yet by the scourge that had ravaged the rest of Europe. God had granted them so many victories since 1340; perhaps the princess and her advisers – among them Andrew Ullford, a veteran of Crécy – believed they might be spared this latest threat.
They were not. In mid-August, Ullford contracted the disease that had been sweeping across western Europe at a pace of two and a half miles a day since the autumn of 1347. While Edward’s family enjoyed the glorious carousal of the tournament life, Ullford lay in the Château de l’Ombrière and suffered the grim descent into death shared by millions of other Europeans. A typical plague victim developed large, tumour-like buboes on the skin: they started the size of almonds and grew to the size of eggs. They were painful to the touch and brought on hideous deformities when they grew large. A bubo under the arm would force the arm to lurch uncontrollably out to the side; sited on the neck it would force the head into a permanently cocked position.
The buboes were frequently accompanied by dark blotches, known as God’s tokens – an unmistakable sign that the sufferer had been touched by the angel of death. Accompanying these violent deformities, the victim often developed a hacking cough that brought up blood and developed into incessant vomiting. He gave off a disgusting stench, which seemed to leak from every part of his body – his saliva, breath, sweat and excrement stank overpoweringly – and eventually he began to lose his mind, wandering around screaming, and collapsing with the suffering.
Ullford died on 20 August, his fate sealed from the moment he walked into a plague zone. Other members of the royal party were quick to succumb. On 2 September, Princess Joan died. She never wore her beautiful wedding dress, nor reached her husband in Castile. Instead she died a bloody, stinking death at fifteen years of age, on the cusp of womanhood. Her only respite at the end was perhaps that she died a virgin and not a pregnant wife. Expectant mothers invariably gave birth during their death throes.
September 1348 was therefore a grim month for Edward III. Word reached England that Joan was dead around the same time that the Black Death began to grip the southern counties, and at the same time he heard that his baby son William of Windsor was also dead, aged three months. The infant was given a full state funeral – a dignity never afforded to Joan, whose body was mysteriously lost in Bordeaux and never recovered.
To lose two children in a month was heartbreak for the king and queen. But there was little time for personal grief, as the realm was cast suddenly and violently into a state of utter devastation and despair. The Black Death tore through the population. It leaped from its entry point – a ship that docked at either Southampton or Melcombe Regis (now part of Weymouth) in Dorset brought the first cases to England – to Wiltshire, Hampshire and Surrey. On 24 October the bishop of Winchester wrote that the plague had made a ‘savage attack on the coastal area of England’ and that he was ‘struck with terror’ at the thought of the disease spreading.
But spread it did. Between 1348 and 1351, many villages lost between one-third and one-half of their populations, the devastation of the plague coinciding with a terrible murrain among sheep, to add to the misery. The chronicler Henry Knighton wrote that ‘there was no memory of death so stern and cruel since the time of Vortigern, King of the Britons, in whose day, as Bede testifies, the living did not suffice to bury the dead’. Settlements particularly weakened during the floods and the Great Famine of 1315–22 were wiped out completely. The great death spared no one for the sake of their virtue or their class. From princesses like Joan to beggars who bled and vomited to death in the streets, there was no avoiding it. Edward might destroy the armies of Philip VI; he was helpless against the armies of the bacterium Yersinia pestis.