Scandinavia was attacked by way of England. According to Lagerbring{207} it was carried by one of the wool ships which sailed from London in May 1349. A member of the crew must have caught the plague just before sailing. The symptoms developed when the ship was at sea and the disease spread so rapidly that within a few days all the crew were dead. The vessel drifted helplessly until at last it ran aground somewhere near Bergen. The perplexed Norwegians ventured aboard and discovered, too late, what sort of cargo their visitors had brought. The story is picturesque and could well be true, though it is sure that Norway would sooner or later have been infected by some other, if less macabre means.
In 1350 King Magnus II of Sweden took somewhat belated alarm. He addressed a letter to his people, saying: ‘God for the sins of men has struck the world with this great punishment of sudden death. By it most of the people in the land to the west of our country are dead. It is now ravaging Norway and Holland and is approaching our kingdom of Sweden.’{208} He ordered the Swedes to abstain on Friday from all except bread and water, to walk with bare feet to their parish churches and to process around the cemeteries carrying holy relics. Such measures did as little as elsewhere to appease the divine anger. Sweden suffered like the rest of Europe and two brothers of the King, Hacon and Knut, were among the victims.
When the Black Death first reached Bergen several of the leading families and the inhabitants of the chapter-house fled to Tusededal, in the mountains, and began to build themselves a town where they thought that they would be safe.{209} Needless to say, the plague pursued them and carried off the entire community with the exception of one girl. Years later the girl was discovered, still living in the area but run wild and shunning human company. She was christened ‘Rype’, meaning wild bird, but seems to have been tamed without undue difficulty, returned to society and married happily. All the land which had been marked out for the new community became the property of herself and her heirs and the ‘Rype family’ were for several centuries among the large landowners of the neighbourhood.
The Black Death, or at least its effects, spread north. For many years the Danes and Norwegians had maintained small settlements for hunting and fishing in Greenland. Preoccupied by their troubles they now gave up the expeditions and abandoned to their fate any unfortunates who might still have been established there. ‘Towering icebergs formed at the same time on the coast of East Greenland,’ wrote Hecker in 1832, ‘in consequence of the general concussion of the earth’s organism; and no mortal, from that time forward, has ever seen that shore or its inhabitants.’{210}
Spain deserves rather less cursory treatment. No major study of the Black Death in the Iberian Peninsula has yet been written{211} but some valuable pioneer work has recently been undertaken, notably by Dr A. Lopez de Meneses,{212} and it is now possible to piece together a rough picture of what happened.
It must first be said that Spain, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was physically and psychologically quite as ill-equipped to face the plague as either France or Italy. Moorish Granada to the south was racked by dissension and depressed by the recent defeats it had suffered at the hands of King Alfonso XI of Castile. But Castile itself was little better. Alfonso, by his triumphal conquest of Algeciras, had the prestige of victory to bolster his position. The preparations which he was making for a siege of Gibraltar promised still greater glory. But the price which his country had paid was exhaustion and improverishment; high enough when one remembers the scars which it still bore as a memorial of the civil wars during the infancy of its King. Finally, in Aragon, Pedro IV was grappling with armed rebellion and victory was not won until 1348. Instability, insecurity, the constant dread of destruction in campaigns embarked on by irresponsible rulers bent upon little save their own personal glory and aggrandisement: these were the hall-marks of medieval Spain.
According to Pedro Carbonell, archivist of the Court of Aragon, the Black Death began in the city of Teruel and spread out from there through all Aragon, reaching Saragossa in September or October 1348. This seems most unlikely. Teruel is far from the sea and all the evidence suggests that Spain was first infected through its ports. The timing too is wrong since the first cases of the plague in Spain were recorded in April and May 1348, almost six months before it spread to Saragossa.
