Though he may have discounted some of the wilder rumours, any northerner who kept his ears open in the spring of 1349 must have been led to believe that, in all probability, he had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the rest of the year. His family and friends could be expected to die around him and those in authority over him were more than likely to join him in the churchyard. Life, as he knew it, seemed on the verge of breaking down. Faced with such a threat the temptation must have been great to eat, drink, be merry and do little else besides. It is notable that, whether through apathy, self-discipline or the resignation that comes from perfect faith, there seems to have been no such reaction. Until the moment that the plague reached his village – with a minor exception in Durham which we shall mention shortly – even, indeed, when it was already rampant, the average northerner continued to till his fields, tend his cattle and perform his manorial duties. The threat of infection was not enough; only death, it seemed, could distract him from his daily duties.
Though the mortality in Yorkshire was not quite so wholesale as in other counties, certainly much less so than in neighbouring Lincolnshire, the Black Death was far from merciful. In the 535 parishes of the diocese of York, of which the great majority were in Yorkshire itself, 223 benefices were vacated by death, sixty-three by resignation and a further fourteen from unspecified causes. Between 42 per cent and 45 per cent of the parish clergy died.
The huge archdeaconry of York shows the usual wide variants in the mortality rate from area to area. The deanery of Doncaster lost nearly 59 per cent of its clergy, yet virtually no benefices were vacated in the marshes between Doncaster and the Humber. In Pontefract the figure was 40 per cent, again with few or no casualties in the eastern flats. And yet in the mountainous district of Craven which, on the analogy of Derbyshire, should have suffered severely, a mere 27 per cent perished. York itself, with 32 per cent, was relatively lightly touched.
In so vast a county it will be obvious that the Black Death could not have arrived everywhere at the same time. It is most unlikely that more than a handful of cases occurred before April 1349; Pope Clement VI’s Bull of 23 March from Avignon referred to the plague as having already begun to harass the diocese but it seems certain that this was premature and that, even if there had been an outbreak in March or early April, it was confined to Nottinghamshire or perhaps to one or two coastal areas. It did not arrive in the city of York until 21 May. June, July and August were the worst months all over the north of England.
The Archbishop of York held to his normal practice and discreetly sat out the summer months at one or other of his rural manors near the little town of Ripon.{360} His suffragan, however, Archbishop Hugh of Damascus, behaved with a vigour unusual in a senior churchman. He was an Austin friar who had once been excommunicated by Archbishop Grandisson for outrageous behaviour.{361} This unconventional background perhaps explained why he so far forgot his rank as to tour his diocese, visit the sick, encourage the healthy and consecrate many new churchyards. These were usually only authorized for temporary use and the citizens of Fulford, a mile or so south of York, found themselves in trouble some years later when they persisted in burying their dead in their new churchyard of St Oswald long after the Black Death had passed. Archbishop Thoresby, in a curious commentary on the pleasures of the times, accused them of ‘taking an empty delight in novelty’ and ordered them to resort forthwith to their traditional burial ground.{362}
York was one of the largest cities in England; smaller only than London and, perhaps, Norwich. Professor Russell{363} estimates the population in 1377 at 10,872. B y that date economic expansion had already been resumed and the plague, destructive though it was, provided no more than a check in a process which lasted till the end of the century.{364} But, at the time of the Black Death, the city was already in difficulties, since a disastrous flood had submerged its western parishes on 31 December 1348.{365} Jeanselme, who contends that floods, famines and earthquakes invariably precede an epidemic of plague, indeed cites the flooding of the Ouse as evidence of his thesis.{366} It is hard to see why, in that case, the plague should have spread with equal vigour to all the other cities where the Ouse did not overflow and no earthquake or famine took place. But one can accept that the commotion which the sudden flood must have caused among the rats of York could have helped the spread of infection throughout the city and the neighbourhood.
