The Black Death полностью

It would be possible to reel off a myriad such domestic details, each adding something to the overall picture but individually meaning little to the reader of today. To punctuate such a recital with constant ejaculations of dismay would be tedious to author and reader alike. But no study of the Black Death can make sense unless one constantly reminds oneself that this was not primarily a matter of statistics and social trends but of a shock of pain and appalling fear felt by many millions of people all over Europe. It is easy to say that medieval man lived closer to the threshold of death than his modern counterpart and that the impact of such wholesale destruction was therefore not so severe as it would have been today. But nothing could have prepared him for the horrors of 1348 and 1349. Behind the catalogue of bare ciphers, behind the laconic phrase ‘…because all the tenants were dead’, lurk innumerable personal tragedies, little if at all less painful because they seemed at that time to be the lot of all mankind.

The plague got a firm grip in Wiltshire before a significant number of cases occurred in neighbouring Hampshire. The lists of institutions to the benefices of Hampshire, assuming the usual gap of a month to six weeks between mortality and replacement, suggest that the first deaths took place at the very end of 1348, that the worst months were February and March 1349, and that things were more or less back to normal by the end of the year.^{274}

But three months before the plague had struck, on 24 October 1348, William Edendon, alias Edyndon or Edyngton, Bishop of Winchester and former Royal Treasurer, had sent out warning orders to all the clergy of his diocese.^{275}

‘A voice in Rama has been heard’; he lamented, ‘much weeping and crying has sounded throughout the various countries of the globe. Nations, deprived of their children in the abyss of an unheard-of plague, refuse to be consoled because, as is terrible to hear, cities, towns, castles and villages, adorned with noble and handsome buildings and wont up to the present to rejoice in an illustrious people, in their wisdom and counsel, in their strength and in the beauty of their matrons and virgins; wherein too every joy abounded and whither multitudes of people flocked from afar for relief: all these have already been stripped of their population by the calamity of the said pestilence, more cruel than any two-edged sword. And into these said places now none dare enter but fly far from them as from the dens of wild beasts. Every joy has ceased in them; pleasant sounds are hushed and every note of gladness is banished. They have become abodes of horror and a very wilderness; fruitful country places without the tillers, thus carried off, are deserts and abandoned to barrenness.’

Whether the inhabitants of these erstwhile earthly paradises would have recognized them from Edendon’s description may be doubtful but the picture of the fate which had overtaken them must have caused dismay in the minds of all his readers. For, went on the Bishop:

To avert this doom the Bishop instructed his clergy to exhort their flocks to attend the sacrament of penance; on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays to join in saying the seven penitential and the fifteen gradual psalms and to take part, barefoot and with heads bowed, in processions around the market place or through the churchyards, reciting the greater litany. Three weeks later, while staying at Esher, he followed up this mandate with a further letter reminding the people ‘that sickness and premature death often come from sin and that, by the healing of souls, this kind of sickness is known to cease’.^{276}