THE Black Death splattered the central part of England with the same haphazard venom as it had shown in the south. In Huntingdonshire it seems to have followed much the same course as in East Anglia. By 1363, read the preamble to the city charter, Huntingdon ‘was so weakened by mortal pestilences and other calamities’ that it was quite unable to pay its taxes. A quarter of the town was said to be uninhabited and the remaining residents could scarcely find the means of supporting life.{341} Three churches were derelict, their parishioners either dead or departed. Since the citizens were hoping to get some remission of their taxes it was obviously in their interests to paint the picture as black as possible but, even allowing for this, it is clear that things were in a bad way. But it is worth reiterating yet once again that the misfortunes of Huntingdon, as with many rural areas in England, were not solely due to the Black Death or even to the cumulative effects of the various epidemics. One of the ‘other calamities’ referred to in the city charter may have been the downfall of one of the local earldoms but more important and more constant was the economic decline of the whole area, and of Huntingdon in particular, which far preceded the violent shock of the plague. The barometer of Huntingdon’s health was the success of its great annual fair and the fourteenth century had already provided a dismal history of small attendances and dwindling revenues. The plague, of course, vastly accelerated the process but Huntingdon in 1353 would anyway have found unfairly onerous taxes which it could have paid with little trouble at the beginning of the century.
Northamptonshire seems to have been among the less afflicted of English counties. Mortality among the beneficed clergy of the archdeaconry was just under 37 per cent; a figure which was reasonably constant in all the deaneries. Only in Peterborough, another of those low-lying areas which were so remarkably well treated by the plague, was the level notably below the average at a mere 27 per cent.{342}
Stamford had a disastrous experience. It lost six incumbents in the six months between July and November 1349, and never recovered the impetus which was carrying it towards the status of an important town. After the Black Death the population remained more or less stable or even continued to decrease; the many references to ‘void places’ in the deeds of later years suggest that a long time passed before the ravages of the plague had been put right.{343}
Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester Abbey, who wrote some time after the Black Death but was an eye witness of the disaster, has left an account of the damage done by the plague in the English countryside.{344}
‘In this same year,’ he recorded,
a great number of sheep died throughout the whole country, so much so that in one field alone more than five thousand sheep were slain. Their bodies were so corrupted by the plague that neither beast nor bird would touch them. The price of every commodity fell heavily since, because of their fear of death, men seemed to have lost their interest in wealth or in worldy goods. At that time a man could buy for half a mark a horse which formerly had been worth forty shillings. A large, fat ox cost four shillings, a cow one shilling, a bullock sixpence, a fat wether fourpence, a sheep threepence, a lamb twopence, a large pig fivepence and a stone of wool ninepence. Sheep and cattle were left to wander through the fields and among the standing crops since there was no one to drive them off or collect them; for want of people to look after them they died in untold numbers in the hedgerows and ditches all over the country. So few servants and labourers were left that nobody knew where to turn for help.
