At the Abbey of Meaux, six miles north of Hull, the monks were already expecting the worst. On the Friday before Passion Sunday, they recalled, they had been violently thrown from their stalls by an earthquake. Such a portent could only have meant trouble to come. When it was coupled with the undoubtedly sinister birth of Siamese twins in Kingston-upon-Hull and their death a few days before, then even the most sceptical could hardly have doubted the imminence of disaster. Disaster duly came. ‘…God’s providence ordained at that time’, wrote the chronicler of the monastery, ‘that in many places the chaplains were kept alive to the very end of the pestilence in order to bury the dead; but after this burial of the lay folk the chaplains themselves were devoured by the plague, as the others had been before them.’{367} The Abbot, Hugh de Leven, and five monks died in a single day, on 12 August 1349; the prior, the cellarer, the bursar and seventeen other monks died also and, out of fifty monks and lay brethren, the chronicler claims that only ten survived.{368} The Abbey found its revenues so reduced that it was forced to lease its grange for life to a certain Sir William de Swine for a lump payment of
The countryside around Hull seems to have been ravaged simultaneously by plague and by the flooding of the Rivers Hull and Humber. An inquisition post-mortem at Hemingbrough showed pasture normally worth 12d. trampled down and valueless. ‘The herdsmen were lying in the churchyard’.{370} All the bondigers and carters of the Abbey of Selby were dead so that turves and hay had to be carried by water. As for Hull itself, the King in 1353 remitted certain taxes: ‘…considering the waste and destruction which our town of Kingston-on-Hull has suffered, both through the overflow of the waters of the Humber and other causes, and that a great part of the people of the said town have died in the last deadly pestilence which raged in these parts and that the remnant left in the town are so desolate and poverty-stricken’.{371} At Wharram Percy the population of the parish was so reduced that, shortly after the Black Death, the side aisles of the church were pulled down and never rebuilt.
But in Yorkshire as elsewhere the structure of government was strained but substantially survived. A curious illustration of this comes from the city of York itself. On 7 August 1349 a jury certified that William Needler had died ‘a natural and not violent death by reason of the pestilence in Coppergate, York’. There must have been some decidedly suspicious circumstances about his death if, when so many were perishing, it was found necessary to conduct an inquest. But the fact that it was possible to assemble a jury and record a verdict according to the due processes of the law at a time when the epidemic in the city must have been at or near its peak is an impressive tribute to the civic sense of the inhabitants or, perhaps, to the discipline with which the authorities imposed their rule.
Lancashire was at this date one of the most thinly populated of the English counties. One area about which an unusual amount of information exists is the deanery of Amounderness to the west of the county, including the parishes of Preston, Lancaster and Blackpool. The Archdeacon of Richmond and his proctor, and Dean of Amounderness, had a dispute about certain fees for the probate of wills. A jury was set up to inquire into the question. They viewed the statistics presented to them with a certain amount of scepticism but no alternative totals were suggested and figures of this kind at least carry slightly more conviction than the vague calculations of the chronicles. In the ten parishes of Amounderness it was claimed, 13,180 people died between 8 September 1349 and 11 January 1350. In the parish of Preston 3,000 died, in Poulton-le-Fylde, it was said, 800 died; in Lancaster, 3,000; Garstang, 2,000 and Kirkham, 3,000.{372}
