By 1349, Lincoln was already losing ground economically and some at least of the decline which followed had its origin in earlier causes. But there is not only the evidence of mortality among the parish priests to show how heavily it lost. The Burwarmote Book shows that, of the 295 wills disposing of burgage tenements which were enrolled in fifty-four years around the year of the plague, 105 can be ascribed to 1349; the fruit, that is to say, of some thirty normal years.{355} Almost all were enrolled in June and July.
The chronicler of Louth Park, the great Cistercian abbey, twenty-five miles north-east of Lincoln, dealt briefly but sufficiently with the outbreak.{356}
‘This plague’, he recorded, ‘slew Jew, Christian and Saracen alike; it carried off confessor and penitent together. In many places not even a fifth part of the people were left alive. It filled the whole world with terror. So great an epidemic has never been seen nor heard of before this time, for it is believed that even the waters of the flood which happened in the days of Noah did not carry off so vast a multitude. In this year many monks of Louth Park perished; among them, on 12 July, the Abbot, Dom Walter de Luda. He was buried in front of the high altar by the side of Sir Henry Vavasour, Knight.’
No rural economy, however resilient, could recover quickly from devastation on this scale. All generalizations are dangerous but at least it can be said with confidence that the wapentakes at the southern end of the Lincolnshire wolds, ‘The classical district of mined churches and lost village sites’,{357} were left entirely desolate. Centuries were to pass before any serious re-colonization took place. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that the population of much of the fenlands at the aid of the thirteenth century was as large, if not larger, than that recorded in the censuses of the nineteenth century.{358} Fifteen villages in Lincolnshire vanished directly after the Black Death or within a decade or two of its visitation. Probably all of them were thinly populated and economically weak before the middle of the fourteenth century but, in most cases, it must have been the plague which applied the
On 28 July 1348, Archbishop Zouche of York had taken alarm at the news from the Continent and sent out a warning order to his flock:
‘In so far as the life of men upon earth is warfare,’ he wrote,
it is no wonder that those who battle amidst the wickedness of the world are sometimes disturbed by uncertain events; on one occasion favourable, on another adverse. For almighty God sometimes allows those whom he loves to be chastened so that their strength can be made complete by the outpouring of spiritual grace in their time of infirmity. Everybody knows, since the news is now widely spread, what great pestilence, mortality and infection of the air there are in divers parts of the world and which, at this moment, are threatening in particular the land of England. This, surely, must be caused by the sins of men who, made complacent by their prosperity, forget the bounty of the most high Giver.{359}
The Archbishop prescribed the usual course of prayer, processions and litanies to avert the coming of the dreadful pestilence.
When the Archbishop thus addressed his flock, the Black Death had hardly arrived in England. Nearly ten months were to elapse before the first cases were recorded in Yorkshire. For the Englishmen in the south, who had heard with alarm of the terrible plague in Europe, the situation had seemed perilous enough. But France was another country, the Channel lay between; ‘it can’t happen here’ was then, as always, the reaction of the Englishman confronted by disorder among the lesser breeds without the law. But such comfort could not last long. From the moment that the plague got a firm grip in Dorset it must have been clear to every well informed Englishman that, in the end, his turn would come. The more pious or the more optimistic no doubt continued to hope that some miracle would avert their doom but, as the plague moved inexorably northwards, even the most confident must have lost their faith.
