The Black Death полностью

Buckinghamshire, where the Black Death was at its worst from May to September, does not produce a very different picture. In Wycombe a startling 60 per cent of the clergy died and it seems improbable that more than half the inhabitants stayed alive.^{271} And yet by 1353 the town had recovered to the point that vacant plots for building were being sought by would-be householders. This however was true only of the town and not of the surrounding countryside, Wycombe’s renewed prosperity did not filter through to the Manor of Bassetbury on its outskirts where, even fifty years later, the water-mill was in ruins, the fulling mill and dye house untenanted, the barns of the manor in need of repair and the tenants generally enjoyed larger holdings and paid lower rents.^{272} Meanwhile, at the manor of Sladen, near Berkhamstead, in a deanery which suffered comparatively lightly, a jury in August 1349 declared that the miller was dead and his mill anyway valueless since there were no tenants left to need his services. Rents to the value of £12 were no longer paid since all the cottagers were dead. One cottage, where a certain John Robyns survived and dutifully paid his 7s. 0d. a year, was the only part of the manor deemed still to be of value.

One is left therefore with the curious situation that a town in the centre of a deanery which lost almost as high a proportion of its beneficed clergy as any in the country, had largely recovered within three or four years, while a neighbouring manor was still in difficulties fifty years later and another manor, in a part of the county which seems to have been far less seriously afflicted, was virtually wiped out. One moral to be drawn is that it is dangerous to generalize even about relatively small areas – one village may suffer disastrously; another, only a mile or two away, escape virtually unscathed. Another moral, still more defeatist, is that all statistics relating to the Middle Ages, particularly those deduced by analogy or extrapolation, should be taken with a massive pinch of salt.

But a partial and somewhat more rational explanation lies in the nature of the different communities. A town like Wycombe, if well run and energetic, could draw away labour from the surrounding countryside. Many of the surviving villeins in the manors of the neighbourhood were disinclined to pick up the shattered pieces of the rural economy. Others resented the efforts of the landlords to exact feudal services which, in previous years when labour was cheap and plentiful, had been allowed to lapse or had willingly been excused against a modest money payment. In a market town, anxious to encourage immigration so as to foster its thriving trades and commerce, such malcontents could find a welcome and, with luck, protection against any effort on the part of the former masters to restore the strayed sheep to its manorial fold. Stadtluft macht Frei, went the adage; and certainly many fourteenth-century villeins savoured their first breath of freedom in some country town seeking to restore the ravages of the Black Death. Wycombe regained its strength at the expense of neighbouring manors like Bassetbury; some at least of the lost tenants of Sladen were probably to be found at work in St Albans or Wendover. That the second half of the fourteenth century showed a progressive depopulation of the countryside is now almost a truism: that many towns showed a corresponding growth would be extremely hard to prove. But at least there can be little doubt that many of them, against the trend of population in the country as a whole, managed successfully to hold their own.

Meanwhile the southern prong of the plague’s advance moved across Wiltshire and Hampshire. As in other areas, little points of certainty crop up above the mist of impressionistic vagueness. At Durrington, near Amesbury, eighteen out of forty-one tenants had disappeared by the end of 1349.^{273} No rents of assize were paid at Tidworth. All the seven free tenants were dead on a moiety of the manor of East Dean and Grimstead and their lands were still standing vacant in 1350.