The Black Death полностью

Inexorably the plague moved on through the West. It seems to have taken three or four months to complete its march but, by the middle of 1349, there can hardly have been a village in Devon and Cornwall which had not received its visit. At the isolated village of Templeton on the moors to the west of Tiverton there was no churchyard to accommodate the dead so that they had to be taken by cart-loads during the night to the other church at Witheridge.^{253} The deanery of Kenn to the south and south-west of Exeter is believed to have been the worst affected in the whole of England; eighty-six incumbents perished from a deanery with only seventeen parish churches.^{254}

One casualty, luckier than most in that it survived, though seeming near to death at the time, was the tin industry of the west country. By the time of the plague the ‘free miners’ of Devon and Cornwall were a prosperous and powerful group enjoying a striking degree of local autonomy. The annual output of tin was some seven hundred tons. The death of many miners and the virtual disappearance of the market proved disastrous. In the years immediately following the plague production dropped away to almost nothing. As late as 1355 no tin at all was being produced in Devon. But in the more important mines of Cornwall recovery was more rapid and by the end of the century output had reached a peak which had only once been exceeded before the Black Death.^{255}

For the historiographer concerned with the Black Death in England, 1349 is a year of which there is much to be written, for it was in the course of this year that almost every town and village was afflicted. At first it is possible to visualize the plague conducted, as it were, like a military operation. The initial attack on the Dorset ports; the bold thrust across country to the north coast so as to cut off communications between the western counties and the mainland; seaborne landings at points along the coast to outflank the defence; the slow mopping up of what opposition was left in Devon and Cornwall; and the main thrust towards the Thames valley and London. But after March 1349 the analogy with a controlled campaign can no longer be pursued. To change the metaphor, the dykes were down and the water was everywhere. The infection no longer advanced regularly from point to point but sprang up simultaneously in a hundred places; reaching its peak, for no reason that can be established, in Norfolk and Suffolk before Cambridgeshire; in Hampshire before Surrey; in Warwickshire before Worcestershire. By July it was spreading across the northern counties, by the end of the year nowhere had been spared. Through winter and summer, through flood and drought; against old and young, weak and strong; the disease went imperviously on its way. To track its course with any precision would be a hopeless task: the most that is possible is to register its impact in the various regions and to highlight its workings at a few points where fuller detail is available.

When the plague turned eastwards after reaching the Bristol Channel the first city to be threatened was Gloucester. The town council, horrified at the tragedy which had overtaken their neighbours in Bristol, decided to seek refuge in isolation. An embargo was placed on all intercourse between the two cities and the gates closed to any refugees who might carry with them the seeds of the plague.^{257} But even if it had been possible to keep out every infectious human, and there is no doubt that the plague had been present in Bristol in its most virulent and infectious form, the citizens of Gloucester could have done nothing to protect themselves from the plague-bearing rat, making its way along the ditches or travelling in the river boats that plied up and down the Severn.