The Black Death in London (4 page)

Royal concern was mirrored by that of the senior clergy of the land. That the threat was being discussed openly in northern England is made clear in a letter dated 28 July from William Zouche, Archbishop of York, to his official in that city.
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He wrote: ‘There can be no one who does not know, since it is now public knowledge, how great a mortality, pestilence and infection of the air are now threatening various parts of the world, and especially England.’ Identifying its cause as the sinfulness of the people, he laid out the earliest strategic defence plans against the plague:

Therefore we command, and order you to let it be known with all possible haste, that devout processions are to be held every Wednesday and Friday in our cathedral church, in other collegiate and conventual churches, and in every parish church in our city and diocese … and that a special prayer be said in mass every day for allaying the plague and pestilence.

A release of forty days of penance was offered for those accepting the indulgence and entering into the processions. This sense of urgency from a northern prelate is striking, as is the sense that only a long-term round of mass prayer was likely to succeed. The warnings had been made public across the largest religious province in the kingdom. If York was making preparations of this nature, how much more concerned must London, far closer to the danger, have been at this time.

The warnings became more urgent. On 17 August 1348 Ralph of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Bath and Wells (no doubt well-informed by John Carlton), communicated to his own archdeacons the fact that a ‘catastrophic pestilence’ had arrived in ‘a neighbouring kingdom’, and urged that ‘unless we pray devoutly and incessantly, a similar pestilence will stretch its poisonous branches into this realm and strike down and consume its inhabitants’.
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His proposed strategy of prayer was similar to, and perhaps based upon, Zouche’s with processions and stations to be held at least every Friday in all churches in the diocese. King Edward was almost certainly keenly aware of the concerns both of Zouche and Ralph of Shrewsbury. Before 23 August 1348 he is reported to have given serious consideration to the ‘pestilences and wretched mortalities of men which have flared up in other regions’, and to have sent letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Stratford, requesting prayers to be said throughout the province of Canterbury.
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Stratford, whose responsibility it was to have communicated this royal request through his bishops, died (though not, as far as we can tell, of any plague) on 24 August, and as a result the transmission of the orders was delayed until the following month.

There is good reason to suspect that the king’s serious consideration also extended to his own spiritual preparations for impending disaster. The chapel of St Stephen the Protomartyr in Westminster Palace had been under substantial renovation for a number of years, but was as yet incomplete. However, on 6 August 1348 Edward confirmed the establishment of a college comprising a dean and twelve canons, granting them his ‘great inn’ in Lombard Street in the city at the same time.
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The king cemented this arrangement on 20 August through a grant for life to a number of his senior servants. Thomas Crosse, clerk of the Great Wardrobe, received the deanery; John de Chesterfield and John de Maydenstone, clerks, received the first and second prebends; and John de Buckingham, a chamberlain, the third.
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On its own, this may simply have represented an appropriate time to move ahead with the foundation of the college, but it is striking that on the very same day, Edward also recorded his intention to enhance considerably the small college of eight canons at Windsor Castle. He determined that:

the glory of the Divine Name may be exalted by more extended worship [by the addition of] a warden and president of the same, fifteen … other canons, and twenty-four poor knights, to be maintained of the goods of the chapel, with other ministers, under the rule of the warden, willing that the canons and ministers shall celebrate divine offices there, according to an ordinance to be made, for him and his progenitors and successors, in part satisfaction of those of whom in the last judgement he will have to give account.
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These two foundations would certainly have provided the king with a considerable personal intercessory armament against the impending scourge.

Despite these early intimations and preparations, life in the city appears to have continued as normal. Major building works continued, at St Stephen’s Westminster and also in the abbey itself, where renovation of both the east and south walks of the cloister were approaching completion, at least part of which were most likely to have been overseen by William Ramsey, the chief royal architect.
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At the Tower of London, a new water-gate, the Cradle Tower, was being constructed to permit direct royal access from the river into the fortress. This tower had been started early in 1348, and building was to continue throughout the plague’s visitation. Its name may have derived from the presence of a drawbridge lowered outward to provide a landing stage for the royal barge and then raised to seal the outer entrance to the water-gate. It remains one of London’s few surviving medieval structures confidently datable to this specific period.
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Commercial land transactions were frequent, and particular documents provide engaging pictures of London life in the weeks before the pestilence struck. For example, on 4 September, the king licensed the mayor, aldermen and citizens to grant in fee to John de Gildesburgh, a wealthy fishmonger, a lane called ‘Desebournelane’ in the parish of St Mary Somerset near Queenhithe, for the purpose of building houses. The lane ran 215ft down to the Thames and was 7ft wide. The grant was conditional on Gildesburgh inserting a gutter ‘to receive and carry off at all seasons of the year, rainy or not rainy, the water from all the highways there running down into the lane in their wonted manner and descending to the Thames’.
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Evidence is plentiful for the backdrop of imports and exports of an enormous range of goods into London’s port and through its gates. Arrangements for the repayment of a loan from hugely wealthy merchants to the king (principally to finance the war with France) give some indication of the quantities of material passing through the port. On 25 September the king issued a writ ‘to the collectors of the custom of wool, hides, and wool-fells on the port of London, with an order to pay Simon de Garton and Hugh de Kynardeseye or to their attorneys 20s out of every sack of wool and of every 300 wool-fells and 40s out of every last of hides taken out of that port, out of the realm’ until they had recouped £7,500 on behalf of the king’s merchant financiers, Walter de Chiriton, Thomas de Swanlond and Gilbert de Wendlyngburgh.
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Controls on exports to Europe are revealed by exceptions made: on 10 September Alan de Aylesham, a merchant of King’s Lynn, was licensed to take twelve packs of worsted cloth to Flanders from the port of London, notwithstanding the late ordinance that cloth must be taken to Calais and not elsewhere.
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Far more modest commercial deals are also reflected in the documents of the time, such as the debt acknowledged on 23 September by Thomas Reyner, citizen and taverner of London, to Hamo the Barber, citizen and cornmonger of London, of £7
8s,
presumably for advance stock.
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Crafts and trades guilds appear in the documentary record for August: the pewterers’ guild ordinances were drawn up and presented to the mayor and aldermen, and admissions to the guild of leatherers recorded in the City Letter Books, for example.
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The Great Wardrobe, the mechanism for managing the royal assets and provisions, is glimpsed in September. Edward issued a writ of aid for one year, for Thomas de Tottebury, clerk of Queen Philippa’s great wardrobe, to bring timber from her parks of Havering-atte-Bower (Essex), Bansted (Surrey) and Isleworth (Middlesex), and stone from the quarry of Tollesworth (Surrey), and from all quarries in the county of Kent by the towns of Maidstone and Aylesford on the Medway. Workmen were to cart and prepare the stone, and ‘to cause the same to be brought to her wardrobe in “La Rioll” London, at her charges’.
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La Riole was a substantial property in the parish of Great St Thomas Apostle, to which such imports occurred roughly yearly, both before and after the principal plague months, suggesting business as usual.

The continuing conduct of the war against France naturally remained a subject of considerable interest to London traders. Many would have been heartened to hear the proclamation on 11 September, transmitted by the sheriffs to the citizens, that a truce had been concluded with France for a term of six weeks, from 13 September to 25 October. However, negotiations for peace were by no means complete, and on 25 September the king gave a commission to William, Bishop of Norwich, the Earl of Lancaster, Robert de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, Sir Walter de Mauny, and John de Carleton, to treat formally for peace with France. A successful outcome could not be depended upon, so simultaneously Edward was augmenting his forces in case of failure: on 1 October he issued a writ to the sheriffs of London (and the mayors and bailiffs of seventeen other sea ports) to unload merchant ships and send them to join the fleet.
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The Tower of London had several roles at this time, including acting as a royal palace, a storehouse, the site of the royal mint and as a royal prison. Both the latter are glimpsed when, on 26 September, the king instructed John Darcy, constable of the Tower, to release one Nicholas de Luk (de Lucca), lately a serjeant of Percival de Portico, master of king’s money in the Tower. De Luk had been imprisoned there for accounting anomalies identified by de Portico, but had protested that he was able to fully account for any inconsistencies. Lacking any counter-argument from de Portico, the king ordered de Luk’s release.
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Another notorious London prison makes an appearance at this time, when an order was sent from the king to sheriffs of London to release William Talentyre, clerk, from Newgate prison, pending a court hearing on a charge against him of writing a charter with the king’s seal attached, ‘ingeniously abstracted from certain of the king’s letters patent’ and then fastened to that charter.
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London citizens themselves and the minutiae of their lives also surface in the documentary records, most commonly through personal disputes and the wills they left. Disputes over property came before the court known as the Assize of Nuisance, held at the Guildhall. On 26 September two complaints were heard by the mayor and aldermen, both touchingly ‘modern’ and familiar. The first was a party wall dispute of sorts. Alan Gille and John de Hardyngham, wardens of London Bridge, alleged that Thomas Isoude, rector of St Margaret Friday Street, removed a rain gutter on the south side of the church to build a kitchen, and replaced the old gutter with two new gutters, one to receive the water from the church, and the other, leading into it, the water and waste from the kitchen. However, the water from both fell instead upon the tiles and party walls of the Bridge tenement adjoining the church, causing foundations, walls and timber to rot. The rector was given forty days to remedy the situation.
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The second case was a very early example of an ancient lights dispute. William Peverel, Queen Philippa’s tailor, complained that Matilda (Maud) atte Vigne had built a cellar, blocking the light of the windows in his tenement in the parish of St Clement Candlewickstreet opening on to her land and garden, which he was intending to enlarge. Matilda replied that she had built on her own land, as she was entitled to do, and that there was no case against her. William maintained that the former owner of her plot, Gilbert de Colchester, had granted by deed to William’s predecessor, in perpetuity, the light of the windows overlooking her tenement, with the right to enlarge them at will, and he produced a deed sealed with Gilbert’s seal. Matilda denied that any such arrangement was ever granted by Gilbert and declared that the deed was not his. The case was referred to the next Husting of Common Pleas.
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The outcome remains a mystery; the Assize was not to hear petitions again for eight months.

Death was ever-present in the crowded city, and many wealthier citizens with property interests were accustomed to drawing up wills for enrolment in the Court of Husting. The summer of 1348 in London was unremarkable in terms of will-making, with two wills drawn up in July, five in August and six in September.
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The court was suspended at harvest time (August and September) and for major fairs, but eight wills were enrolled in July 1348, which was not an unusual number for the height of summer. Another potential indicator of concern over matters of mortality, requests from wealthy citizens for papal permission to choose one’s confessor at the hour of death, reveals no especial change from levels in previous years: two married couples, Simon de Berkyng and his wife Lucy, and Thomas Leggy, then Mayor of London, and his wife Margaret, received indults of this sort in July and August respectively,
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but that was the sum total up to September 1348. By this date wealthy Londoners were neither dying in excessive numbers nor, it would appear, expecting to. To the east, the picture was similar for the poor customary tenants working the land of the Bishop of London’s manor at Stepney. The periodical court rolls are incomplete, but the court held on 30 October 1348, covering areas of Stepney, Hackney, Mile End, Stratford and Holywell Street, reports no deaths from the previous court (undated, but probably at least a month earlier), confirming instead three tenements held in the lord’s hands (due to earlier deaths of tenants, one at least dating back to September 1347).
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