The great Abbey of Westminster did not escape. Simon de Bircheston, its truculent Abbot, who had been prosecuted for assaulting a royal stonemason some twenty years before, took refuge in his country home at Hampstead. But in spite of his precaution he was an early victim{300} and twenty-seven monks accompanied him to the grave. A large black slab in the southern cloister of the Abbey probably commemorates their death and may even cover their remains.{301} By May, Simon Langham, who had been appointed a prior only a month before, was the only monk left deemed fit to administer the monastery.
The many deaths in the countryside and the natural reluctance of the carters to venture into the inferno of London meant that the usual supplies of food often failed to arrive. The Black Death prevented anything near a famine developing by rapidly and substantially reducing the demand but it was still often difficult for a citizen of London to know where to turn for his next loaf of bread. Piers Plowman noted:
Many Londoners went out into the adjoining countryside in search of food and so spread the plague among those who had sacrificed a profitable market in the hope of escaping it.
London survived. Probably, indeed, it recovered as quickly as any city in England. In 1377 the population of the city itself seems only to have been about thirty-five thousand but this was after further attacks of plague and takes no account of population growth in the immediate vicinity.{302} The fact that all the chancery and exchequer work continued to be done in London was a powerful magnet and there was no city in which the villein, anxious to escape the attentions of a vengeful lord, could bury himself with greater confidence. Dr Creighton probably goes too far when he says that we may be sure ‘from all subsequent experience; that the gaps left by the plague were filled up by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three years’,{303} but it is likely that, even in so short a period, much of the lost ground was made up.
And yet the mark left by the Black Death was not to be seen only in the new cemeteries. The sharp fall in moral standards which was noticed in so many parts of Europe in the years after the Black Death was nowhere more striking than in London. Such accusations of degeneracy recur throughout the ages – this time they may have had slightly greater justification than usual. Knighton reported that criminals flocked into the city{304} and John of Reading told of the great increase in crime, in particular crimes of sacrilege.{305} From this period, the city began to enjoy a doubtful reputation in the eyes of other Englishmen – a city of wealth but also wickedness; of opportunity, but opportunities to earn damnation as well as fortune. Walsingham denounced the Londoners roundly: ‘They were of all people the most proud, arrogant and greedy, disbelieving in God, disbelieving in ancient custom.’ Those who live in great cities are traditionally believed to be harder, more sophisticated and more rapacious than their country cousins but the Londoner certainly acquired his reputation the hard way and probably went a long way to deserving it. Any city which suffers as London suffered and rebounds rapidly to even greater prosperity can be excused a certain fall from grace during the years of its recovery.
SUSSEX and Kent were assailed from every side as the Black Death moved across from the West, spread south from London and made its independent entry at half a dozen Channel ports. In Sussex the absence of episcopal registers makes any generalization difficult. A few details, selected more or less at random, show that the county did not escape more lightly than its neighbours. Only five brethren survived out of a total strength of thirteen at the Priory of Michelham.{306} The Abbot of Battle had secured permission to fortify his Abbey only ten years before, but no moat or ramparts could save him from the plague which carried him off with more than half his monks.{307} At Appledram, almost in Hampshire, the number of customary reapers was reduced from two hundred and thirty-four to one hundred and sixty-eight, a drop of 28 per cent; at Warding, right at the other end of the county, twelve freemen and villeins died in March 1349, and a further sixty had perished by October, twenty-five leaving no direct heir.{308}
For the Black Death in Kent there has fortunately survived the account of William of Dene, a monk of Rochester, one of the few English chroniclers who handles the events of the day with anything like the impressionistic brio of his continental counterparts.{309}
‘In this year,’ he recorded,
