Certainly Norwich was anything but a pleasant place to be in the summer and autumn of 1349. ‘There died’, recorded Blomefield, possibly confusing figures for the city with those for the county or diocese, ‘no less than 57,104 (or more rightly as others have it, 57,374) persons in this city only, besides religious and beggars.’{331} He admitted that this figure might seem surprisingly high since the population of Norwich when he wrote in 1806 was still quite a lot less than the casualties of 1349, but explained that the city, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was ‘in the most flourishing state she ever saw, and more populous than she hath been ever since.’ Given about a thousand inhabitants to each of the sixty-odd parishes and throwing in an allowance for the suburbs and the religious houses, Blomefield calculated that the total population of 1348 must have been a minimum of seventy thousand. Seebohm accepts that the death rate may have been in the neighbourhood of fifty-seven thousand but reduced the total population to sixty thousand; evidently feeling that a death rate of 95 per cent called for no special explanation.{332} Basing himself on the Leet Rolls Professor Russell estimates that the population of Norwich was some thirteen thousand in 1311.{333} Subtracting the poll tax figure for 1377 of 5,928, the figure for the population which remains to be accounted for comes remarkably close to 7,104; the last four figures of Blomefield’s total. Russell ingeniously surmises that the five at the beginning was added by some careless transcriber and that the ancient record to which Blomefield referred should in fact have been read as a broadly accurate seven thousand dead. He could be right but since, as he himself frequently points out, medieval statistics were invariably grossly over-stated, it seems easier to believe that the usual rule applied in the case of Norwich. What at all events seems certain is that Norwich, the second city of the kingdom, lost more than half its population and not only never recovered its position in relation to the rest of England but, in absolute terms, had barely regained its vanished citizens by the end of the sixteenth century.
Though the whole of Bishop Bateman’s diocese may not have suffered as much as its capital there is no doubt that mortality among the clergy was unusually high. In the years before the Black Death the average annual figure for episcopal institutions was eighty-one. In the year between 25 March 1349 and 25 March 1350 the total rose to 831.{334} For the population as a whole, Jessop remarked: ‘If any one should suggest that
The Bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Ely was in Avignon when the plague reached his territories. He seems to have made no effort to return. He had already appointed five Vicars General to look after the diocese in his absence and, on 9 April, appointed an additional three ‘to exercise their duties until death’.{336} In his letter he referred to ‘the epidemic, as it is called, wondrously increasing in the diocese’,{337} a phrase soon to be fully justified but at the time a little premature since it was not till April that the plague took a serious grip in Cambridgeshire. He specified which of the Vicars General was to dispose of vacant benefices in his absence and carefully listed the order of succession to this attractive prerogative.
In the whole diocese there were eighteen times as many institutions as in a normal year, a far higher ratio even than in Norfolk and Suffolk. Only one of these institutions is known to have been due to the resignation rather than the death of the previous incumbent though there are other cases in which details are lacking.{338} But the incidence of the plague seems to have been even more erratic than in other parts of England. Within a radius of ten miles of Cambridge thirty-five out of fifty tenants died on the Crowland manors at Oakington, twenty out of forty-two at Dry Drayton, thirty-three out of fifty-eight at Cottenham and yet at the manors of Great Shelford and of Elsworth, though there may have been deaths which were not recorded in the Court Rolls, there is no evidence that the Black Death had any effects at all. All these communities were in broadly similar country with populations of between two and four hundred. Their inhabitants suffered the same weather, farmed the same land, ate the same food. No one, be he epidemiologist or historian, has yet been able to suggest plausible reasons why one manor should have lost half its tenants while another seems to have suffered little if any ill effects.
