The Black Death полностью

No such universal or horrifying mortality had taken place within living memory though Bede, in his De gestis Anglorum, records that, in the time of Vortigern, king of the Britons, not enough people were left alive to carry the dead to their graves.

In general the countryside was soon back to something near normal. Inevitably, some of the poorer villages were less well able to resist the depredations of the plague and the temptations offered by other, richer neighbours. At Wyville, between Melton Mowbray and Grantham, an inquisition post-mortem found ‘…the three carucates are worth little, for the land is poor and stony, and lies uncultivated for want of tenants after the pestilence’.^{345} The village was never fully to recover. But, anyway in the Midlands, such cases were rare; and even Knighton, notoriously gloomy as he was, could have found little to shock him in the outward aspect of Leicestershire by 1354 or 1355.

‘The fearful mortality rolled on,’ recorded the canon of Leicester,

As usual it is impossible to reconcile such figures with what little is known about the total population. Undoubtedly many people died. But the nearest approach to a firmly based estimate suggests that the city could not easily have contained more than three thousand five hundred inhabitants before the Black Death and may even have had less than three thousand.^{347} It is difficult to believe that Knighton’s figures were more than a picturesque expression of arithmetical inadequacy.

A curious feature is that a surprisingly small drop in the number of tax-payers in Leicester and the amount of tax which they paid was recorded between 1336 and 1354. This, prima facie, is hard to reconcile with a death roll that could not possibly have been less than a quarter and was probably a third of the total population. One may permissibly draw several deductions from this. The first and most obvious is that here is another proof of the inaccuracy of Knighton’s estimates. Another, slightly more valuable though no more than confirmation of what has already been remarked elsewhere, is that the poor must have borne the brunt of the plague. The tax-payers were naturally the richest section of the community and there is nothing astonishing in the fact that, pro rata, many more survived than was the case with their less fortunate fellow-citizens.

But this alone is not enough to account for so sensationally rapid a recovery. The most interesting conclusion to be drawn is that a boom-town like Leicester, centre of a prosperous agricultural area and with rapidly growing trades and industry, could quickly make up its strength recruiting not only peasants but free men of some wealth and standing as well. The same has already been pointed out in the case of other towns but, in Leicester, a local historian has analysed the lists of new inhabitants so as to establish, as nearly as possible, from where they came.^{348}