Those determined to put their faith in ‘sophisticated’ mathematical methods and to apply ‘general laws’ to the pitifully meagre and very uncertain detail that historical evidence often provides for the answering of just such interesting and important questions, are either to be pitied because they will be sinking in quicksand while believing themselves to be standing on solid earth, or to be combated because they darken counsel with their errors.{413}
Professor Russell is far from having accepted these strictures on his theory.{414} But he is too serious a scholar to maintain categorically that his must be the correct solution. The question remains open. In so far as any consensus can be said to have evolved it would probably be that the total population could have been anywhere within a range of which Russell’s 3.7 million would be the lower point and 4.6 million or so the higher. A total of 4.2 million has no more precise justification than any other but is certainly no less plausible and is a convenient central point from which to work.
Of this 4.2 million, how many died. ‘Only one in ten survived’, says one chronicler; ‘three quarters perished’, says another; ‘four fifths’, a third. Few estimates fall as low or lower than a half. Such lurid speculations, of course, contain little of interest to the statistician; enough cases have been established where the estimates of the chroniclers were palpably impossible to dispel any lingering belief that the man on the spot knew best But to arrive at a more rational figure is not easy.
One much favoured method is to seek to calculate from the ecclesiastical records the number of the beneficed clergy who died, to establish this as a proportion of the total and then to apply the same or some related percentage to the lay population. It was the application of this technique which led Cardinal Gasquet to claim that fully 50 per cent of the population perished in the two years beginning in July 1348.{415} The imperfections of the method have already been discussed.{416} Cardinal Gasquet himself was led badly astray by such deficiencies and even the more evolved workings of Professor Hamilton Thompson and Dr Lunn leave certain pockets of uncertainty.
Nevertheless studies of this kind can produce interesting and highly relevant results. Hamilton Thompson{417} and Lunn{418} between them have established the mortality rate of beneficed clergy in ten of England’s dioceses. The figures are remarkably consistent, ranging between just under 39 per cent for York and 39.6 per cent for Lichfield to 47.6 per cent for Bath and Wells, 48.5 per cent for Ely and 48.8 per cent for Exeter, Winchester and Norwich. On this basis it is reasonable to assume that something close to 45 per cent of all parish priests died during the plague. Similar statistics based on twelve of the more important monasteries show a surprisingly similar rate among the monks, 44 per cent of whom perished.
But though these figures are undoubtedly relevant to the problem of the total casualties caused by the Black Death, exactly how they should be used is harder to establish. It is as certain as any medieval statistics can be that, for England as a whole, the mortality rate among the people was lower than 45 per cent. Applying the ratio between dead clergy and dead people referred to above{419} one must conclude, on the other hand, that it cannot have been lower than 34 per cent or so – say a third to avoid any false impression of exactitude.
