The existing graveyards were soon too small to meet the demand. A new cemetery was opened at Smithfield and hurriedly consecrated by Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London. But the second of the two new cemeteries, founded by the distinguished soldier and courtier, Sir Walter Manny, has provided historians with the greatest confusion. Early in 1349 Sir Walter leased for twelve marks a year and subsequently bought some thirteen acres of unused land to the north-west of the city walls at a spot called Spittle Croft. He built a chapel on the site, dedicated to the Annunciation, and threw it open for the overflow of victims of plague within the city.{294} Eventually the Charterhouse was built on part of the ground. The confusion arises over the number of dead which the new graveyard accommodated. Robert of Avesbury says that two hundred people were buried there almost every day between the feast of the Purification (2 February), and Easter (2 April).{295} If this is taken to mean that burials took place at this rate during what must have been the worst months of the plague and it is assumed that they continued at a reduced rate for the next few months, then a minimum of seventeen or eighteen thousand victims must have found a home there. This figure is enormous but still trifling compared with that put forward by the London historian, Stow,{296} who recorded that he saw an inscription in the churchyard which read:
A great plague raging in the year of our Lord 1349, this churchyard was consecrated; wherein, and within the bounds of the present monastery, were buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead, besides many others from thence to the present time, whose souls God have mercy upon. Amen.
He claimed that this figure had been confirmed by his study of the Charters of King Edward III.
Camden claimed to have seen the same inscription but, in his recollection, the figure was an almost equally startling forty thousand. There is no indication that these new cemeteries were intended to replace rather than supplement the existing churchyards, one and probably two other new ones were opened; it would seem therefore that Manny’s site could not possibly have taken more than half the victims of the plague, and probably a great deal less. If Stow’s figures were correct, this would mean, therefore, that a minimum of one hundred thousand people died of the Black Death in London, a figure credulously adopted by Rickman in his Abstract of Population Returns.{297} Even if Robert of Avesbury’s figure were accepted the total of the dead could hardly be less than forty thousand. Figures above fifty thousand have frequently been bandied about. Yet all these totals seem unreasonably high when set alongside a population of sixty or seventy thousand. The ecclesiastical registers, which might have provided a more accurate check, do not survive but such snippets of information as exist – as, for instance, that three out of seven benefices in the gift of the Abbey of Westminster fell vacant in the spring and summer of 1349 and both those in the gift of the Abbey of St Albans – suggest that casualties in London were more or less in line with those in other cities. Certainly there is no reason to think that it suffered less. A total of between twenty and thirty thousand dead, probably closer to the higher figure, is likely to be as accurate a guess as one will get unless some further source of satisfies is discovered.
Though, as everywhere, the poor suffered most, there were quite enough deaths among the rich and powerful to show that nobody was immune. John Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, died at his manor of Mayfield in August 1348. It is quite probable that he was not a victim of the plague but there is no doubt about his successor, the Chancellor, John Offord, who died in May 1349 at Westminster before he could even be enthroned. Clement VI then appointed the great scholar Thomas Bradwardine but, he, in his turn, died in the Bishop of Rochester’s London palace on 26 August 1349. A former Chancellor, Robert Bourchier, died of the plague in London and one of his successors, Robert Sadington, died in 1350, though of uncertain cause. The royal family seems to have kept out of trouble, the only casualty being the King’s daughter Joan who died at Bordeaux on her way to Portugal, but Roger de Hey ton, the royal surgeon, died on 13 May 1349.{298} There were heavy losses among the dignitaries of the City. All eight wardens of the Company of Cutters were dead before the end of 1349. Similarly, the six wardens of the Hatters’ Company were all dead before 7 July 1350 and four wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company died in 1349.{299}
