The bailiwick of Clare, about fifteen manors belonging to the Earls of March and scattered widely over East Anglia, provide an interesting illustration of the extent to which a great landlord could hold his own in time of trouble.{327} The bailiwick on the whole was not very seriously affected: certainly much less so than another group of Mortimer manors around Bridgewater Castle in Somerset. Standon, a village not in East Anglia at all but in Hertfordshire, was the worst hit. The number of labour services was halved and some tenements remained unoccupied for more than twenty years. But even on this battered manor, once the initial shock had been weathered, the total of rents received fell only by some 15 per cent. Wages rose sharply in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death but by the 1360s had been pegged back to little above the level ruling before the plague. For a year or two a large part of the lord’s demesne was left uncultivated but this too was soon put right.
The Mortimers seem to have suffered decidedly less than most of their neighbours. This was, as a generalization, true of the whole class of great territorial magnates who held their own throughout the recession of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Dr Holmes has pointed out in his analysis of the estates of the higher nobility that, by thus retaining their habitual revenues, they were in effect taking a larger share of a decreasing product.{328} The damage thus done was blanketed in the middle of the fourteenth century by the reduced pressure on resources which the great mortality of the Black Death produced. But, in the long run, it was a movement against an economic trend which was to weaken the stability of the system which made it possible.
Norfolk in particular is rich in those holes and mounds and crumbled ruins which local historians have painstakingly identified as the lost villages of another era. We have already referred to the tendency to ascribe such disappearances to the baleful effects of the Black Death. In Norfolk this seems even less justified than elsewhere. More than a hundred Norfolk villages existed at the time of the Domesday Survey and have subsequently disappeared. Thirty-four of these had already vanished by 1316 and others almost certainly fell into desolation between that date and 1348. Only one, Ringstead Parva, ceased to exist as a community between then and 1351; the bulk of the remainder lingered on till the second half of the fifteenth century or even later.
‘There can be little doubt’, concluded Mr Allison,{329} ‘that the Black Death played no more than a contributory part in village depopulation in Norfolk.’ But though it is easy to exaggerate the destructive power of the plague, it would be far more misleading to minimize it. Great tracts of the county, in particular the barren Brecklands around Brandon, can literally be said never to have recovered. Economically weak and on the decline even before 1348, the blow which the Black Death then inflicted and, more insidious, the opportunities which the plague created for finding better land in other, more prosperous parts of the country, sealed the doom of these unlucky areas. The hold which civilization had established on the border-lands during the great expansion of the thirteenth century was especially weak in East Anglia. Now it was driven inexorably back and the wild took over its own again.
Bishop Bateman was conducting peace negotiations with the French when the plague neared the borders of his diocese. He returned by sea to Yarmouth on 10 June and was told on landing that his brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman of Gillingham, was already in his grave.{330} Hurrying to Norwich, he found the plague raging; his Vicar General, Thomas de Methwold, lurking at Terlyng in Essex; and his palace, next to the new cemetery in the Cathedral Close, made almost intolerable by the stench of the dead. He at once ordered Methwold to return to his duties but barely was the Vicar General back at work than the ‘intrepid Bishop’, as Dr Jessop hopefully called him, was himself on his way to his rural manor at Hoxne nearly twenty miles south of Norwich. He spent three days at Ipswich in the next few months but did not visit the capital of his diocese again till the plague was safely over.
