The Black Death

In the previous instalment of this chronicle of Langham we left the village in the feudal state imposed by the Normans, which lasted in much the same form until the middle of the 14th century.

Living conditions in such villages as Langham were basic and sanitation almost non-existent. Most of the people lived in what today we would regard as squalor, in gloomy, thatched houses, often cheek-by-jowl with hens, pigs or goats. The only plumbing, if one can call it that, might have been found in the solar, the private accommodation for the lord and his family within the manorial hall – sometimes the lord’s own chamber was equipped with a wooden chute which directed excrement from the first floor to ground level, where it was disposed of by a servant.

Nonetheless, the feudal economy was relatively efficient at producing food. By 1348 Langham had seen a growth, perhaps even a doubling or more, in population; in 1086 there had been only about fifty people here.

The 14th century was a time of expanding trade as well as population. A network of trade routes was developing from the east to serve markets in Europe. And arising somewhere in the east was the parasitic bacterium Yersinia pestis. In that it exploits two hosts, one of them also a parasite, it is termed a ‘hyperparasite’. The first host is the Oriental Rat Flea, Xenopsylla cheopis.

Warning: what follows is the stuff of nightmares!

The biology of the relationship between parasites and their hosts is often extremely complicated, having evolved and been refined over vast periods of time. The relationship between Yersinia, fleas and their warm-blooded hosts is no exception.

In health, fleas suck blood until satiated. When infected with Yersinia, however, the rat flea’s foregut is made to fill with a mass of clotted blood and replicating bacteria. Thus it is unable to take a full meal. Instead, while vainly trying to feed, it takes in small quantities of fresh blood and regurgitates them, together with the bacteria, into the wound it has made.

A rat flea infested with Yersinia

The disease resulting from this infection is the plague, of which there are three types: bubonic, septicaemic, and pneumonic, depending on the route of infection. Bubonic and septicaemic plague are spread via flea-bites and can also result from exposure to the bodily fluids of victims; pneumonic plague is spread by the inhalation of airborne droplets from a victim.

The preferred hosts of Xenopsylla cheopis are various species of rodent. It may have evolved as a parasite of marmots, but is equally at home on rats, particularly the Black Rat, Rattus rattus, also known as the Ship Rat for its habit of running up hawsers and infesting the holds of cargo ships. The Black Rat is believed to have evolved in India and was spread by trade throughout the Roman Empire; the Plague of Justinian in 541-9 AD is the first confirmed outbreak of plague in history.

The Black Rat, from an etching by Samuel Howitt, 1808

© Wellcome Collection; licence

Yersinia is capable of infecting a wide variety of mammalian hosts besides rodents, including cats, dogs, pigs, camels, and of course people. It can even infect chickens, but in medieval times it was rats that proved to be its most deadly vector.

An outbreak of plague first reported from the Gobi Desert in 1321 had spread to China by 1331 and eastern Russia in 1338. India succumbed in 1342. By 1346 it had reached the Volga and the Black Sea regions. A single strain of the bacterium was involved and the same one then made its way throughout Europe.

In June 1348 a ship docked at Weymouth in Dorset, carrying goods from Gascony in south-west France. One of crew was suffering from the bubonic form of plague. In this, the bacteria proliferate in the lymphatic system. Lymph nodes, particularly in the groin, thighs, armpits and neck, become painfully enlarged to form swellings called buboes. Extensive bruising turns the skin black. There may also be gangrene of the hands, feet, and limbs generally, also serving to blacken the skin. For at least 60% of those infected, death supervenes after two or three days of unimaginable suffering.

Necrosis of the hand caused by plague

Given the unsanitary conditions prevailing in 14th-century Britain, it is no surprise that the plague spread here as rapidly as it had across mainland Europe, where some 50% of the population died.

Bubonic plague arrived in Norwich in January 1349. From an approximate population of 25,000, as few as 6,000 people survived. Two thirds of the clergy perished; the dead were buried in huge mass graves. Half the population of Lynn succumbed, as did two-thirds of the people in the Rows at Yarmouth.

The plague reached north Norfolk in April 1349. Binham is known to have been devastated, and we may be sure that Langham did not escape. By the time the Black Death had finished with these villages in 1351, at least half their inhabitants were dead.

Plague is an indiscriminate killer. The lord of the manor was just as likely to have died as the humblest cottar. A number of settlements were abandoned altogether: Norfolk is famous for its ‘ghost villages’.

What made the plague doubly terrifying was complete ignorance of its cause and mode of spread. It was ascribed variously to divine retribution, ‘miasma’, and sundry other nonsense. Herbal remedies, vinegar and even spells were invoked to ward it off. To no avail. It was common for someone to be perfectly healthy one morning and dead from pneumonic plague by the next.

This was also a time of bad weather and crop failure. Between 1348 and 1350 it is estimated that the gross domestic product of England fell by 30%, a crash that the feudal system could not survive. Yersinia emancipated those serfs it did not kill, for they suddenly found their labour in great demand. The social structure had collapsed along with the economy.

In its place another arose. Working people were no longer bound to the lord or his manor and could move freely from place to place and sell their services to the highest bidder.

This system, though much blunted and compromised over the centuries, remains in place today. Even the lowliest sweeper of factory floors regards himself as a free man. When he goes home at night he is the castellan of his own abode, however modest. Even horror and destruction, then, can have their compensations – for the survivors.

Feudal Langham

When the Normans arrived in 1066, Langham would have been a farming village using a system of cultivation originating with the first Anglo-Saxon settlers. Its chief characteristic was the open field – a large area of unenclosed land divided into a number of arable strips. These were measured according to the ‘rod’, ‘perch’ or ‘pole’, five and a half yards. Strips were four poles wide and twenty or forty poles long, so that a forty-pole strip covered an area of one acre. Its length, two hundred and twenty yards, made a furrow’s-length or furlong. The ‘pole’ has largely fallen out of use, but it is nice to know that the cricket pitch is, internationally, still four poles long.

Each farmer had a certain number of strips, scattered over the field and mingled with his neighbours’. The lord’s strips could be mixed in with these also. There was little call for hedges or fences, though movable hurdles of willow or hazel could be brought into use when needed. Regions of better soil-fertility in different parts of the field were thus more fairly shared. The whole enterprise called for close community cohesion, so that at harvest-time, for example, everyone – except the lord and his household – reaped on his neighbours’ strips as well as his own.

The chief crops were einkorn, rye, barley and oats, supplemented by peas and beans, though there were regional variations and it is impossible to know what mix of these was cultivated here.

At harvest in inland places the ears of cereals alone would be cut off, using sickles, and the straw used for thatching and fodder, but at settlements within reach of extensive reed-beds, the stalks were often cut near ground-level, since reed is a much better thatching material than straw. In that case the stalks would be used as fodder once threshing was over.

Besides arable crops there were meadows, also cultivated on communal principles. After the harvest and hay-making, these and the arable would be opened up for common pasture, in Anglo-Saxon times the grazing rights being ascribed to each man by rulings of the village as a whole, again ensuring a sharing of resources.

As to livestock, sheep were important and would become increasingly so, especially in Norfolk. In spring and early summer cattle browsed the young and tender foliage at and near the edges of woodland, while pigs in particular were allowed to forage deeper in the woods for acorns, beech-mast, fungi, and whatever else they could find – Langham at that time, like the rest of England, was more heavily wooded than it is today.

Little is known about Anglo-Saxon agricultural implements. A hoard of tenth-century tools found in Lincolnshire contains an iron hoe-sheath and a bill-hook. The type of plough in use was almost certainly an ard.

Ploughing with an ard in Ethiopia

Image credit: Rod Waddington; licence

Towards the end of the period, just before the arrival of the Normans, there is a hint (e.g. in the Luttrell Psalter) that a plough with a mouldboard might have been used. This more efficient plough was certainly used after 1066 and on into the rest of the Middle Ages.

In Norman England, certainly, the soil was tilled with oxen pulling such a plough, and it was the ridges or ‘lands’ left by the mouldboard which divided one man’s strip from another’s. This so-called ‘ridge and furrow’ system persisted into Tudor-Stuart times. The outline of many of these strips in what is now pastureland is a common feature of the landscape today, often clearly visible, especially in aerial photos.

The strip system was efficient, provided the object was to feed the village rather than supply the market. In a typical village there might have been three or four such open fields, rotated in use so that one could be fallowed.

Land tenure

The word manor arrived with the Normans. In France it had simply denoted a seigneurial residence, but in England came to mean a form of social structure in which land was divided between the lord’s ‘demesne’ and land held by tenants in return for cash, produce, labour, or military service. Later, military service could be commutable to payment in the form of scutage or shield-money.

Elements of the manorial system pre-dated the Conquest and, like the mix of crops, varied across the country. On arrival the Normans would have found some of them familiar. But the Normans, descendants of the Vikings, were warlike people whose organisation depended on ferocious loyalty up the whole chain of command. William the Conqueror swept away the ancient Anglo-Saxon system of ‘booklands’ and ‘folklands’, with all their legal complexity, and took everything but church-lands for himself.

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting King William

The social structure was pyramidal. The king regarded himself as a vassal of God, a vassal being someone who has an obligation to a suzerain. William, as suzerain, appointed vassals of his own, and these, suzerains in turn, appointed their own vassals, all the way down the pyramid.

William’s vassals were the barons (‘men of the king’), to whom were granted tracts – sometimes very extensive – of land. Each of these men repaid the king with an oath of absolute loyalty and was required to provide military service as well as proceeds from the exploitation of his tenancy.

A baron was thus a mere tenant of the king. His own tenants owed him fealty too. The number of tenants in a manor varied, as did the activity of its lord in cultivating his demesne. Tenants were freemen; below them were the serfs, and below these, at the outset of the feudal system, there were also slaves: slavery had been an important feature of the Anglo-Saxon economy. In that economy slaves were recruited as the spoils of war. Many male slaves worked in pairs as ploughmen; female slaves might be dairymaids or discharge other menial duties, while in some households slaves performed less lowly functions. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists about 28,000 slaves, fewer than had been counted in 1066, and slavery in medieval England died out altogether by about 1150.

The Church operated in parallel with the Crown, though the Anglo-Saxon clergy were almost all deposed and replaced with Norman or at least compliant churchmen. Before the Conquest, Langham was held by Guert, a brother of King Harold; both were killed at the Battle of Hastings. In 1086 William bestowed Guert’s holdings on the Bishop of Thetford, William de Beaufeu (aka William of Bello Fargo or William of Belfou); the bishopric of East Anglia was moved from Thetford to Norwich in 1094 in readiness for the completion of the new cathedral there.

Serfdom

In Norman England there were various classes of serf, a serf being a peasant tied to the lord himself (a ‘villein in gross’) or to the manor (a ‘villein regardant’). A villein in gross was owned by the lord, but was not a slave.

The villein regardant owed his lord servitude in return for accommodation and the right to cultivate land (generally about 30 acres), and he was usually required to provide taxes or rents in the form of produce from his strips. He owned a pair of oxen which were teamed with three pairs of his neighbours’ to pull the plough; the lord typically owned four plough teams. He was required to spend part of his time working on the demesne, could not leave the manor without permission, and held his status by birth, so that if you were a villein regardant your children would be villeins regardants too. It was possible, however, with the lord’s consent, to gain manumission and become a freeman.

The villeins in gross laboured on five or fewer acres and did not own oxen or horses.  Below the villeins in status were the cottars or cottagers, also called bordars, who were labourers working merely in lieu of food and rent, sometimes also growing food for themselves on small plots of land.

The Domesday Book records that the population of England comprised on average 12% freeholders (note that only the king and the Church owned land: a ‘freeholder’ was a freeman tenant), 35% villeins, 30% cottars and 10% slaves, the latter rising to 25% in Cornwall.

In 1086 there were in Langham 31 villeins, 4 cottars and 5 slaves. The two churches owned between them 16 acres. Besides the strip-fields there were six acres of meadow and a mill. At this time windmills had not been built in any number in England, so this was almost certainly a watermill, implying perhaps that the flow of our branch of the River Stiffkey was more copious then, since no trace of a leat has yet been found.

The manor was managed by a bailiff, the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon reeve.

The term ‘feudal’ derives from the medieval Latin feodum or feudum which is translatable to the word ‘fee’ in two senses: ‘a tribute to a superior’ and ‘a perquisite or any allotted portion’. It describes a reciprocal relationship in which the senior partner has the greater benefit. Norman England can be seen as a form of top-down economy with the greatest benefit to the king, while yet allowing a high degree of local autonomy with all the advantages that brings. It was stable enough to have lasted into the middle of the fourteenth century and had a lasting effect on the English psyche.

The Anglo-Saxons were themselves invaders, traditionally led by the Germanic war-leaders Hengest and Horsa, who arrived on these shores after the departure of the Romans. By 1066 they had so much intermarried with the native Britons that a new and recognisable cultural identity had been established: they regarded themselves as the rightful possessors of the country. When their king was slain at the Battle of Hastings and the usurper William, on questionable legal grounds, seized the whole country and turned it into a feudality, resentment ran high to the point of armed resistance, culminating in the atrocities of the Harrying of the North: one of William’s earliest acts was to build the Tower of London to control the capital, and he embarked on a programme of castle-building throughout his realm.

The change in status between the common people and their new French overlords can even be traced in the language. The peasants tended the animals and cooked the food and their masters ate it: sheep, mutton (mouton); bull, beef (boeuf), pig, pork (porc). William’s canny distribution of land to his allies, many of whom were little better than thugs, marked the beginning of a class system which plagues England even to this day. As with the Anglo-Saxons, the years and centuries added a sheen of respectability to the titles conferred by William and his successors. A similar process occurred when Henry VIII grabbed the property of the Church with the first Act of Supremacy in 1534.

From the Norman Conquest, perhaps, we derived the national attitude to the French, whom we both admire and dislike, and on whom we have waged war at various points in our history.

It is not easy to imagine exactly how, day to day, the lower orders regarded their masters. In return for his bondage, the serf did receive some benefits. The lord was obliged to house him, he had access to the fruits of cultivation, and he was part of a structured community whose security was ultimately guaranteed by the king. If ill used he could appeal to his lord for justice. The time that a villein regardant had to spend working on or for the demesne could be as low as two days a week.

So not all was quite as horrible as it sounds, and though it took nearly a hundred years, the Normans did abolish outright slavery. The very worst aspect of serfdom was loss of freedom, but then which of us is truly free today?

In the next instalment of this chronicle we shall look at the Black Death, which at a stroke destroyed the feudal system and changed for ever the way we think about ourselves.