The Black Death полностью

He was not a happy man. He had lost a son and his beloved wife. He had seen horrors that would linger with him all his life. But he still had three children left; he was luckier than some. Hard work and the knowledge that he had an important role to play had helped him over the last months. Blakwater was at least a living village, Preston Stautney was a village of the dying, if not already of the dead. He turned his face towards the living with sadness, with fear but also with a kind of gratitude. The nightmare was over. The pain remained but there was, after all, a great deal to be said for being alive.

In writing this chapter I have found of particular value:

R. H. Hilton, A Mediaeval Society, London, 1966.

H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor, Cambridge, 1956.

A. Jessop, The Coming of the Friars and other Historic Essays, London, 1894.

J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring life in the Middle Ages, London. 1891.

G. G. Coulton, Mediaeval Panorama, Cambridge, 1938.

G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge (Mass), 1942.

and, analysing the effect of the Black Death on a village or group of villages:

P. D. A. Harvey, A Mediaeval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, Oxford, 1965.

A. E. Levett, The Black Death on the Estates of the See of Winchester, Oxford, 1916.

E. Robo, The Black Death in the Hundred of Farnham.

Some of these relate to a period somewhat before the Black Death. Others have had to be used with discretion because they deal with areas of England other than that where Blakwater is situated. But the overall picture has not been falsified.

IN Blakwater, thirty-eight people died out of a total of about a hundred and fifty; dose to a quarter of the population. In Preston Stautney things must have been worse; probably nearly half the villagers succumbed. Which of these villages was nearer the national average? Can, indeed, any national average be established? Did a higher proportion of the population die in England than, for instance, in France or Italy? And how large was the actual death roll? Did a million English die? Two million? Three?

To none of these questions is a categoric answer possible but, now that the geographical tour of Europe has been completed, it is at least possible to hazard a few guesses. The most ample material on which an estimate can be based is certainly to be found in England but even here the base is shaky and deductions hazardous. It is possible to arrive at a wide variety of conclusions by differing but reasonably valid lines of argument, and exceedingly hard to establish which, if any, is the best one.

The first and, in some ways, most perplexing problem is the size of the total population in the middle of the fourteenth century. The main difficulty is that no attempt at anything approaching a general census was made between Domesday year and the poll-tax returns of 1377. Nor did even these attempt to cover all the counties of England or all kinds of men. Nevertheless it is possible to hazard a reasonably confident guess that the population of England in 1086 was something near 1.25 million,^{402} and that, by 1377, this had risen to about 2.5 million. If it were permissible to assume a steady increase of population between these two points then it would, of course, be easy to arrive at the approximate size of the population at any given date. But this is very far from being the case. On the contrary it is now established with a fair degree of certainty that the population rose to a peak about 1300 and then stagnated or even declined in the first half of the fourteenth century.