Plague Land (46 page)

Cotehardie

A closely tailored jacket that became popular in the mid 1300s. Worn over breeches, it developed into a scandalously short and revealing fashion.

Cottar

The poorest class of villeins. A person with very little land, usually only the curtilage of their own cottage.

Crespine

A netted metal device for holding and styling a woman’s hair.

Customal

A document listing the financial and legal arrangements between the lord and his tenants.

Dais

A raised platform at the end of the dining hall/great hall. Usually furnished with a table and benches, it was reserved for people of high status within the household.

Demesne

The fields on the manor estate that were reserved for the lord’s personal use and profit. Local villeins would work this land in return for the ability to rent their own plots. Tenants were often expected to work in the demesne, although they received wages for their labour.

Destrier

A war horse. Used by knights in battle and at jousts.

Hue and Cry

If a dead body was found under suspicious or unnatural circumstances, every man in the tithing was required to join a noisy search party to alert the local neighbourhood to the murder, and to flush out the culprit.

Humours

Harking back to the teachings of Galen in antiquity, the human body was said to be ruled by four humours, or bodily fluids, which needed to be kept in balance. Yellow bile, phlegm, black bile, and blood. The balance of your humours ruled both your health and your disposition. So, for example, an excess of black bile caused a person to become melancholic.

Hundreds Court

A court that dealt with serious crime, or cases that could not be tried by the manorial court. This court was presided over by the sheriff, unless the case involved murder – in which instance a royal judge was summoned.

Indulgences

Taking the form of a letter or receipt, an indulgence was an award for the remission of sin. It was earned by prayer and good deeds, but increasingly in the later Middle Ages through a money donation.

Infirmarer

The infirmarer managed the infirmary at the monastery, where the sick and elderly of the community were cared for. The position was a prestigious post, and the infirmarer was usually trained in basic surgery and medicine.

Kirtle

A tunic-like garment, usually made of wool.

Lay Brother

A monk of lesser status than the ordained members of the monastery. The lay brothers undertook much of the heavy agricultural and domestic work for the community.

Manorial Court

This court was overseen by the lord of the manor. It usually dealt only with minor issues restricted to the manor itself, such as disagreements between tenants, or infringements of the lord’s rights.

Pardoner

A man who was authorised by the bishop to sell indulgences and relics for money. The funds were often used by the Church to finance special projects. The pardoner kept a proportion of his takings as payment.

Pottage

A type of soup often made with dried peas, grains, and sometimes meat or fish.

Purlieu

A deforested area on the edge of hunting forests, still subject to forest law – especially with respect to hunting.

Reeve

An officer of the estate, responsible to the lord for organising and overseeing agricultural work on the demesne fields. A position of status within the community.

Royal Judge

Royal judges, from the court of the king’s bench, were responsible for justice with regards to cases of murder. Travelling to each county approximately twice a year, they tried the criminal cases, which had been referred to them by the sheriff.

Sheriff

The position held the ultimate responsibility to the king for law and order in a shire. Literally the ‘shire reeve’, he had the power to arrest, imprison, hold trials, and organise juries, but not the power to try and sentence a suspect for murder.

Solar

A room set apart from the rest of the household for use of the lord’s family. This room usually had a large window, giving rise to the idea that it was named after the sun. However, the word may also have derived from the French word ‘seul’, which means to be alone.

Sumptuary Laws

A law passed in 1337 and strengthened in 1363, prescribing exactly what clothes each class of person was allowed to wear. For example a yeoman farmer and his family were forbidden from wearing furs other than rabbit, fox or cat. Only the most noble and wealthy person might wear ermine.

Surcoat

A tunic or outer coat.

Tenant

A person who rented farmland from a lord, but who received payment for working on the demesne. The status of the tenant was as a free man, meaning he and his family could leave the estate without the permission of the lord.

Villein

Villeins worked the lord’s lands, but were not waged. Typically they worked for three days a week, with extra services required at certain times of the year such as at harvest. In return for their labour they were able to rent a small amount of land from the lord. Their status was unfree, meaning the lord had a great deal of control over their lives.

Yeoman

A richer tenant farmer, who had the means to rent larger areas of land, and could afford to employ both servants and farmhands. They often acted as officers for the manor, such as the reeve or constable, giving their family greater status. Often more prosperous than the lord himself, in the wake of the Black Death they were known to take over the management of whole estates in return for paying fixed rent.

Historical Note

The bubonic plague of the 1340s originated in the arid plains of central Asia and was the second pandemic of the same infection – the first having been in the sixth century. The fourteenth-century plague was known at the time as the Great Mortality or the Pestilence. The term ‘Black Death’ was not coined until later in the seventeenth century.

The plague was caused by the bacillus, Yersinia Pestis, which lives in the digestive tract of infected fleas. It has three forms – bubonic, pneumatic, and septicaemic, but the bubonic form is the one we most commonly associate with the Black Death. Certainly most of the eye-witness accounts would support this assumption.

The bubonic form is an infection of the lymphatic system, caused by the bites of infected fleas as they move from rat to human hosts. To begin with, the sufferer experiences a high temperature, sweating, and severe aches to the joints. After a day or so the buboes swell in the lymph nodes of the groin area and under the armpits. As these painful lumps, typically the size of an egg, turn from red to black due to internal bleeding, the body is overwhelmed by a bacterial infection that, during the 1340s, was usually, but not always, fatal. It was an excruciating and horrific death that caused mass hysteria.

More deadly however, even than the bubonic plague, is the pneumonic form, which occurs when the same bacillus, Yersinia Pestis, infects the respiratory system rather than the lymphatic. It is likely that this form of the infection was also at work during these years. Rather than being spread by the bites of fleas, it relied upon airborne transmission and was probably passed on by the coughing up of blood or by the inhalation of flea faeces. This virulent and highly contagious form of the plague was rapid in its onset and always fatal. Pneumonic plague was also less reliant on the climate than the bubonic form, and would explain why the plague continued to claim victims through the winters of 1348 and 1349. Fleas need warm temperatures to remain active, whereas the pneumonic plague could continue to cause infection by human-to-human transmission during the colder winter months.

A third form of the plague is the septicaemic, which affects the bloodstream, once again causing an overwhelming infection, ending inevitably in death.

The plague itself is believed to have originated in Mongolia, and was confined to that area for many centuries before it moved west in the mid fourteenth century. The reason for this new outbreak was a perfect storm of circumstances that provided the bacilli with the opportunity and conditions to spread.

Firstly, there was a resurgence of commerce between east and west due to the opening of new trade routes in the years preceding the plague. There was increasing demand for Eastern goods such as exotic spices and silk – but these were not the only cargoes travelling west. The black rat was happy to live alongside humans, particularly and crucially on ships. But even if the rats themselves were not travelling, these new trading routes were able to transport infected fleas. It is estimated that a flea can survive up to eighty days without a host, which was time enough for these parasites to travel long distances in fabric and clothing.

Secondly, the population of Europe had grown rapidly during the previous two centuries – the so-called Medieval Warm Period. During this time of more favourable climate, the population of England had grown from somewhere around two million at the time of the Norman Conquest, to at least four million (but possibly as high as six million) by 1300. As the climate then began to cool in the little ice age of the fourteenth century, this larger population came under pressure, as inefficient farming practices and poor growing conditions caused a succession of famines. A weakened population was inevitably more vulnerable to the effects of the bubonic plague. The population of England did not recover to pre-plague levels until 1600.

Lastly, the medieval world was a dirty, smelly place where people lived cheek by jowl with their animals, their own waste, and their own animals’ waste. They had little conception of sanitation – and where there is waste and dirt, you will also find rats. However, once the local black rat population had become infected, the subsequent collapse in rat numbers meant that fleas were suddenly in need of new hosts. And who better to have turned to than the humans who lived in the same streets and houses?

After the devastation of the plague, it is easy to understand how people searched about for a cause – if only to give some meaning to this catastrophe. The predominant belief in society was that God had allowed the plague to happen because of sin. The populace considered themselves guilty of all of the seven deadly sins, but the finger was particularly pointed at the sin of pride – with many commentators blaming the ornate, impractical, and revealing fashions that had become popular in the earlier part of the century.