The Black Death in London

Barney Sloane, Barnie Sloane

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752428291
• eBook ISBN: 9780752496399
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: British History

The Black Death of 1348–49 may have killed more than 50% of the European population. This book examines the impact of this appalling disaster on England's most populous city, London. Using previously untapped documentary sources alongside archaeological evidence, a remarkably detailed picture emerges of the arrival, duration and public response to this epidemic and subsequent fourteenth-century outbreaks. Wills and civic and royal administration documents provide clear evidence of the speed and severity of the plague, of how victims, many named, made preparations for their heirs and families, and of the immediate social changes that the aftermath brought. The traditional story of the timing and arrival of the plague is challenged and the mortality rate is revised up to 50%–60% in the first outbreak, with a population decline of 40–45% across Edward III's reign. Overall, The Black Death in London provides as detailed a story as it is possible to tell of the impact of the plague on a major mediaeval English city.

NOTES

1Translation of the Register of Charterhouse in St John Hope 1925, 7.

2Benedictow 2004; Cohn 2002.

3Röhrkasten 2001; Megson 1998.

4Sharpe 1889, 1890.

5CHW,Vol. 1, xiv; xxii: The wills related only to property in the city, setting a benchmark for those enrolling them; furthermore, enrolment of each cost 15s 10d – a significant sum in itself.

6The widest review of the wills is that of Weetman 2004, analysing trends from 1259–1370. Röhrkasten 2001 represents the most detailed review of the evidence for the period from 1348–1400. Other studies have included Cohn 2003, 197; Benedictow 2004, 136.

7Freemen citizens and their families were a much smaller group than the entire resident population of London; it has been estimated that they made up slightly more than a quarter of the total population (CPMR, Vol. 2, xlvii–liv).

8Röhrkasten 2001, 176–7; Megson 1998, 129.

9From 1327–47, an average of twenty-eight wills were drawn up, and 27.2 enrolled per annum, ranging between a minimum of sixteen wills and fifteen enrolments (in 1344) and a maximum of forty-nine wills and fifty-two enrolments (in 1328): CHW,Vol. 1.

10Estimates for 80,000 by about 1300 are provided in Keene 1984; a lower figure of 60,000 is argued in Nightingale 1996. The famine years of the early fourteenth century saw a national population drop of perhaps 10 to 15 per cent (e.g. Nightingale 2005, 44). The issue of whether the population subsequently rose or remained static between then and 1348 is unclear (Barron 2004, 239). I have elected to assume a population of 60,000 in 1348.

11Between 1347 and 1375, women were responsible for just 13.8 per cent of all Husting wills, a figure that dropped to 12.1 per cent between 1375 and 1400.

12Wood 2003.

13VCH Middx 2, Appendix 1, 102–3.

14Weetman 2004, 40–51.

15Röhrkasten 2001, 180.

16TNA SC 2/191/60.

17DNB, 2, 378.

18The disease was known to medieval people as the great mortality, pestilence or epidemic: the term ‘Black Death’ was not coined until mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• One The Beginning
• Two The Pestilence in London
• Three The Great Mortality
• Four Pestilence in Later Fourteenth-Century London
• Five Social Consequences of the Plague
• Appendix London’s Contribution to Understanding the Black Death
• Notes
• Bibliography