The priory and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, suffered little in the epidemic, only four inmates dying. Thorold Rogers attributes this to the good water supply and efficient drainage system which had been installed by an earlier prior. It is hard to accept any very direct relationship between bubonic plague and pure drinking water,{310} but the fact that the establishment was clean and free from rats would certainly have helped to keep infection at bay. It is surprising that the flow of pilgrims to Canterbury hardly slackened even when the plague was at its worst.{311} It might have been supposed that the mortality among putative pilgrims and the obvious perils of travel in time of pestilence would have been enough to scare off even the most devout. Presumably those who had already survived an outbreak wished to give thanks for their deliverance while those who were yet to experience one hoped to accumulate merit in advance. In neither case was the result likely to be wholly satisfactory. No doubt their determination was welcome in Canterbury, since every visitor was a source of income, but as each wave of arrivals brought in fresh infection even the most avaricious of citizens must have asked himself whether the blessing was an unmixed one.
Somehow the old and decrepit Bishop Haymo of Rochester managed to survive while all his retinue perished around him. Reference has already been made to the long-established belief that the Black Death struck down the strong in the prime of their life and spared the children and the aged.{312} In this, as in all things, it would have been like the Bishop to seek to conform to tradition. But such evidence as exists does not support the theory. Analysing five hundred and five inquisitions post-mortem, Professor Russell found that by far the heaviest mortality, 46 per cent, occurred in one of the most senior age-groups, those between fifty-six and sixty.{313} The oldest age group of all, those above sixty, suffered next most badly, with mortality of almost 40 per cent. It is, of course, true that a higher proportion of this group would anyhow be likely to die within any given period even without the Black Death to help them on their way. But the incidence of mortality is still strikingly higher than among those in the prime of their life: only 20 per cent for those between twenty-one and twenty-five; 19 per cent for the twenty-six to thirties; and 28 per cent for the thirty to thirty-fives. Tradition does seem to be right, however, in maintaining that the children were spared. Only 7 per cent died of those between six and ten and 15 per cent between eleven and fifteen.
By these rules the Bishop was fortunate to have outlived his priests and outstandingly lucky to have survived his pages. After such hazards one might think that he had earned a tranquil old age. But new troubles beset him. Even when the worst of the plague was over he found that his clergy hesitated to do their duty in their parishes; preferring either to remain prudently at home or to abandon their flock to their fate and retreat to what they hoped might prove a safer area. The phenomenon was by no means peculiar to Kent but it seems to have been particularly remarked on there. Stephen Birchington of Canterbury also referred to the fact that ‘… parish churches remained altogether unserved, and beneficed parsons turned away from the care of their benefices for fear of death…’{314}
Dene of Rochester in his turn commented on the decadence which had overtaken the country under the stress of the Black Death. His strictures on workmen possessed by the spirit of revolt have already been noted but worse was to follow: ‘The entire population, or the greater part of it, has become even more depraved, more prone to every kind of vice, more ready to indulge in evil and sinfulness, without a thought of death, or of the plague which is just over, or even of their own salvation… So, day by day, the peril in which the souls of clergy as well as people are to be found has grown more dangerous…’
One sees Dene of Rochester as a crabbed, reactionary figure, passed over for promotion, embittered, filled with the darkest doubts about the younger generation. But there are too many similar reports to leave room for doubt that he had grounds for his grumblings.
