There is not much to delay one in the other counties of the south. In Hertfordshire, March and April were the worst months. But many cases occurred even when the summer was over and there seems to have been a second, milder outbreak in the course of 1350. In certain manors, where the ravages of the plague had been particularly ferocious, it became the custom to head future schedules of expenditure with ‘an enumeration of the lives which were lost and the tenancies which were vacated after the great death of 1348.’{315} The archdeaconry, an area considerably larger than that of the county, does not seem to have suffered particularly badly. In the low-lying fen district, St Ives lost only 23 per cent, Holland 24 per cent and Peterborough 27 per cent of the beneficed clergy.{316} Marshes and fens, perhaps because of their association with mosquitoes, are generally linked in the popular mind with fever and disease. In the case of the Black Death they belied their reputation. One possible explanation is that they were often remote from the sea and the main lines of communications and therefore to some extent sheltered from infection. Another is that such damp and sparsely inhabited areas held little appeal for the wandering rat. But the impact of the plague was too spasmodic to allow even exceptions to the general rule to be defined exactly and certain areas of fen country suffered as badly as any in the country.
To quote statistics which show that Hertfordshire suffered less severely than other counties is not to detract from the agonies which the inhabitants endured: to the victims it mattered remarkably little whether the mortality was 37 per cent or a mere 34 per cent, the risk and the pain of death seemed much the same. A scrawl on the wall of the church of St Mary, Ash well, somehow catches the black horror of the plague. ‘Wretched, terrible, destructive year…’ the unknown scratched in the stone sometime in 1350, ‘…the remnants of the people alone remain…’{317} There are plenty of examples in the county of almost complete disaster. At Standon, six miles north of Ware, thirty-two customary tenants were supposed to mow the lord’s hay. In 1349 no men went to mow, went to mow a meadow and the hay was left to rot in the fields.
But where an analysis has been made of a group of manors big enough to provide a reasonable sample, one is once again struck with the amazing speed of the countryside’s recovery. Dr Levett, whose individual contribution to the history of the Black Death, though in some respects now seen to be too extreme in its conclusions, has done so much to bring sanity and cool scientific reasoning into a sphere peculiarly rich in ill-supported fantasy, has studied,
The average historian of the plague period seems to have worked from two assumptions:
(1) that every peasant farmer was occupied to the utmost of his capacity before the pestilence; and (2) that after it the whole remaining population, supine and unalert on their own holdings, tended to rise up and wander about the country in search of high wages. Neither assumption will hold water.
Once the worst of the shock was over, energy, discipline and intelligent administration quickly got the wheels of agriculture turning once again. The St Albans’ manors were well run and prosperous, on good farming land and with the power and wealth of the Abbey to sustain them. They had little difficulty in luring away labour from other, less fortunate estates. It would be a great mistake to assume that what was true of them was true of the majority of English manors but, equally, they were by no means unique.
The Abbey itself suffered rather worse than its manors.{319} Michael of Mentmore, one of the greatest of its Abbots, was struck down after thirteen years in office on 2 April 1349:
