The Black Death in the diocese of Ely: The evidence of the bishop's register

The Black Death of 1348-9 is thought to have killed a third to a half of the population of Europe. More exact measurements of the plague mortality are hard to come by, but the ten episcopal registers of England which survived the great pestilence provide some of the most complete and reliable information about the number of deaths on a yearly basis. Although there are qualifications to be made before using this information, the defects in the bishops' registers are not so great that the historian can afford to neglect this valuable source. In addition, there is sometimes anecdotal evidence in the registers which speaks of the human drama of the plague, in contrast to the impassive testimony of numbers. This paper will examine the evidence of the register of Thomas de Lisle, bishop of Ely from 1345 until 1361, as it relates to the Black Death. The first half of the paper will address the statistical evidence, to be followed by a discussion of the anecdotal material. De Lisle's register has not been extensively studied since J. Lunn's 1930 thesis on The Black Death in the Bishops' Registers, which is now lost. A re-evaluation of this evidence will reveal that the inhabitants of East Anglia, and of Cambridgeshire in particular, were among the greatest sufferers of the plague.     

Pest,Stadt, Wissenschaft — Wechselwirkungen in oberitalienischen Städten vom 14. bis 17. Jahrhundert

After the Black Death of 1348 the Plague was not only the cause of personal disasters and individual despair, but was also of political and social significance. Each outbreak of the epidemic implied a crisis for the community with crucial consequences for trade, jurisdiction, administration, executive powers and for food supply. The faith in authority by the leading university medics was tragic, as they subscribed to the hippocratic-galenical humoral pathology and to the miasmatic theory. On the other hand, municipal authorities, from the 14th century onwards responded to the epidemic in a pragmatic manner, isolating the sick, carrying out checks, imposing trade embargos and special epidemic laws. From the 15th century onwards people were also put under quarantine. The medics' role, their relationship with the government and their tendency to play down the diagnosis will be discussed at length, together with the questionable tradition of the Regimina pestis.     

Stature and frailty during the Black Death: the effect of stature on risks of epidemic mortality in London,A.D. 1348–1350

Recent research has shown that preexisting health condition affected an individual's risk of dying during the 14th-century Black Death. However, a previous study of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality during the epidemic failed to find a relationship between the two; this result is perhaps surprising given the well-documented inverse association between stature and mortality in human populations. We suggest that the previous study used an analytical approach that was more complex than was necessary for an assessment of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality. This study presents a reanalysis of data on adult stature and age-at-death during the Black Death in London, 1348–1350 AD. The results indicate that short stature increased risks of mortality during the medieval epidemic, consistent with previous work that revealed a negative effect of poor health on risk of mortality during the Black Death. However, the results from a normal, non-epidemic mortality comparison sample do not show an association between stature and risks of mortality among adults under conditions of normal mortality. Fisher's exact tests, used to determine whether individuals who were growing during the Great Famine of 1315–1322 were more likely to be of short stature than those who did not endure the famine, revealed no differences between the two groups, suggesting that the famine was not a source of variation in stature among those who died during the Black Death.     

论黑死病对英国人口发展之影响

黑死病的肆虐对英国人口的发展产生了重大影响。1348~1349年,黑死病迅速席卷英格兰,夺去了30%~40%的人口;更严重的是,此后的人口发展处于长期停滞的状态,而这主要是瘟疫频繁爆发的结果。     

Books received

Comparative neglect of the effects of the Black Death in Aragon makes a collection of documents published in 1956 by Dr López de Meneses particularly valuable. Over half the documents, mostly dating between 1348 and 1351, describe the disruption and disorder which occurred in the administrative and economic spheres, and it is on these that this study will focus.King Pedro IV showed flexibility and pragmatism in his treatment of the crisis, but normal administrative processes were only slowly restored, and people took full advantage of the shortage of officials and the loss and discontinuity of legal records. Economically, the royal treasury suffered an almost immediate drop in income. The king could not grant financial aid to his subjects, but lessened taxes and tributes, and frequently interceded on behalf of the Jews. The king also issued useless price and wage controls.The documents shed little light on the problem of mortality dates, but they vividly illustrate the confusion, fraud, and lawlessness which occurred in the aftermath of the plague. There is no indication that the epidemic caused changes in the fundamental character of any Aragonese institution, or that the king's activities were paralyzed by the crisis. Though grave, the damages of this first plague were not irreparable.     

瘟疫来自中国?——14世纪黑死病发源地问题研究述论

根据德米西等人的记载以及考古学的发现,可以肯定黑死病自亚而欧的传播趋向。但在黑死病的发源地问题上,学者们颇有争论,特别是中国受到了较多的关注。但从词源学的角度来看,黑死病源于中国的论断很可能是个谣传。鼠疫自然疫源地在中亚地区自东而西连绵不绝的分布,使我们目前很难断定到底哪一处是瘟疫的发源地;而只有在断定了瘟疫在中亚各地爆发的时间次序,才有可能进一步考证其准确的发源地。从某种意义上说,整个中亚都是黑死病的发源地。     

The black death in Aragon, 1348–1351

Comparative neglect of the effects of the Black Death in Aragon makes a collection of documents published in 1956 by Dr López de Meneses particularly valuable. Over half the documents, mostly dating between 1348 and 1351, describe the disruption and disorder which occurred in the administrative and economic spheres, and it is on these that this study will focus.King Pedro IV showed flexibility and pragmatism in his treatment of the crisis, but normal administrative processes were only slowly restored, and people took full advantage of the shortage of officials and the loss and discontinuity of legal records. Economically, the royal treasury suffered an almost immediate drop in income. The king could not grant financial aid to his subjects, but lessened taxes and tributes, and frequently interceded on behalf of the Jews. The king also issued useless price and wage controls.The documents shed little light on the problem of mortality dates, but they vividly illustrate the confusion, fraud, and lawlessness which occurred in the aftermath of the plague. There is no indication that the epidemic caused changes in the fundamental character of any Aragonese institution, or that the king's activities were paralyzed by the crisis. Though grave, the damages of this first plague were not irreparable.     

The Archaeology of the Peasant Land Market in Pre-Plague England c ad 1290–1350: A Way Forward

WHILE ARCHAEOLOGISTS are well informed about plague and climate change, many are less familiar with the emergence in pre-plague England of a vigorous market in peasant land in which both freemen and villeins were represented. Yet the tenant’s growing freedom to buy and sell land arguably played a larger part in transforming the social structure of late-medieval England than either the Black Death (ad 1348–9) or Great Famine (ad 1315–17). Accustomed to seeing the five decades before the pestilence as a final interlude of prosperity before the onset of recession, archaeologists have looked chiefly to the post-plague years for evidence of change. However, the toxic combination of a hyperactive peasant land market, combined with the worst subsistence crisis that England has ever known, had encouraged the growth earlier in the century of a rich and increasingly acquisitive and dominant peasant or ‘kulak’ class with properties it needed to protect. The large and more permanent village house, it is argued here, originated at this time. It is also suggested that it was successful peasant engrossers, rather than status-hungry, would-be gentry, who were probably the diggers of the overwhelming majority of non-manorial moats which survive in such numbers across England. Although more work is needed to date these moats archaeologically, it is already widely assumed that they belong primarily to the first half of the 14th century. If this is correct, the smaller domestic or ‘homestead’ moat, occurring in multiples of up to 13 in some parishes, can now be seen as persuasive material evidence of a catastrophic crisis in law and order which historians know only from the documentary sources.     

The transmission of the Black Death to western Europe: a critical review of the existing evidence

In 1347 the Black Death was introduced from the north-eastern coast of the Black Sea and the Sea of Asov towards southern and western Europe, where it then spread dramatically. A report by the Italian chronicler Gabriel de Mussis of the siege of Caffa (1345–47) is often credited as describing an early deployment of a “biological weapon”, thus triggering the “Black Death” in western Europe. He reports that Mongol troops threw plague victims into the city with catapults, thus contaminating the inhabitants. However, re-evaluation of historical, biological and epidemiological data indicates that the spread of the disease was probably an inevitable consequence of the intense trade relations along the coasts of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Therefore, the alleged catapulting of infected corpses would rather have been a marginal contribution to the diffusion of the disease (if it took place at all). The infection was subsequently spread by refugee ships via ports at Constantinople and along the Mediterranean trading routes and harbours towards Genoa, Marseille and Venice, thus initiating the Plague in Europe. The further propagation of the disease inland is still a matter of controversial discussions. However, epidemiological data indicate that the most essential animal vector for further distribution of the plague in central and northern Europe was probably the human louse (Pediculus humanis), instead of the oriental (or tropical) rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis).     

论14世纪英国的聚落环境与黑死病传播

黑死病在14世纪的英国流行期间,既有遍及全国的普遍性,又体现出不同人群和地域之间的差异性。这种流行特点与当时英国的聚落环境密切相关。其中,聚落空间环境为鼠、蚤、人的紧密共存创造了条件,聚落社会环境则使得瘟疫可以在人与人之间迅速传播;同时,这两者还相互联系,依据不同的社会、自然条件,对瘟疫的传播形成影响。但无论是聚落空间环境,还是聚落社会环境,都是在特定的自然和社会条件下人类创造的一种生存和生活环境,因此瘟疫可以依托聚落环境而肆虐,亦可随着聚落环境的改变而受到控制。在这背后,则是人在与瘟疫博弈中获得主动的不懈努力。     

Age Patterns of Mortality During the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349-1350

This paper examines adult age-specific mortality patterns of one of the most devastating epidemics in recorded history, the Black Death of A.D. 1347-351. The goal was to determine whether the epidemic affected all ages equally or if it targeted certain age groups. Analyses were done using a sample of 337 individuals excavated from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, which contains only individuals who died during the Black Death in London in 1349-1350. The age patterns from East Smithfield were compared to a sample of 207 individuals who died from non-epidemic causes of mortality. Ages were estimated using the method of transition analysis, and age-specific mortality was evaluated using a hazards model. The results indicate that the risk of mortality during the Black Death increased with adult age, and therefore that age had an effect on risk of death during the epidemic. The age patterns in the Black Death cemetery were similar to those from the non-epidemic mortality sample. The results from this study are consistent with previous findings suggesting that despite the devastating nature of the Black Death, the 14(th)-century disease had general patterns of selectivity that were similar to those associated with normal medieval mortality.     

Medieval Britain in 1972

WHAT WAS IT LIKE to be a teenager in medieval England? Despite the fact that medieval society often singled young apprentices and workers out for comment, their study has been largely neglected in medieval archaeology. The skeletal remains of 4940 children and adolescents (6.6–25 years) from 151 sites in medieval England were compiled from a combination of primary data collection and secondary data from published and unpublished skeletal reports and online databases. The aim was to explore whether apprentices could be identified in the archaeological record and, if so, at what age they started work and what impact occupation had on their health. The data were divided into urban and rural groups, dating from before and after the Black Death of ad 1348–49, and before the Industrial Revolution. A shift in the demographic pattern of urban and rural adolescents was identified after the Black Death, with a greater number of young females residing in urban contexts after 14 years. The average age of males in urban contexts increased from 12 years to 14 years after the plague years, contrary to what we might expect with the greater opportunities for work after the Black Death. There were higher rates of spinal and joint disease in the urban adolescents, and before the age of 18 years, their injuries were more widespread than their rural counterparts. Domestic service was the potential cause of greater strain on the knees and backs of urban females, with interpersonal violence evident in young urban males. Overall, it was the urban females that carried the burden of respiratory and infectious diseases, suggesting they may have been the most vulnerable group. This study has demonstrated the value of adolescent skeletal remains in revealing information about their health and working life, before and after the Black Death.     

Infective Economies: Empire,Panic and the Business of Disease

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics.     

Wissenstransfer auf dem Prüfstand. Europäische Mediziner im Kampf gegen die Pest von Moskau 1771

Foreign knowledge being tested: European physicians fighting the Moscow plague of 1771. – The transfer of Western medicine to Russia increased significantly in the Eighteenth century. Foreign doctors were employed, their writings translated, their education standards copied. But who regarded that knowledge as superior and why? Taking the Moscow Plague of 1771 as a case study, this article examines the crucial role foreign and Russian medical practitioners played during the epidemic. It argues that especially those ideas and practices that were useful for social control filtered into politics and public discourse, but failed to convince the majority of the population.     

Rats cannot have been intermediate hosts for Yersinia pestis during medieval plague epidemics in Northern Europe

The commonly accepted understanding of modern human plague epidemics has been that plague is a disease of rodents that is transmitted to humans from black rats, with rat fleas as vectors. Historians have assumed that this transmission model is also valid for the Black Death and later medieval plague epidemics in Europe. Here we examine information on the geographical distribution and population density of the black rat (Rattus rattus) in Norway and other Nordic countries in medieval times. The study is based on older zoological literature and on bone samples from archaeological excavations. Only a few of the archaeological finds from medieval harbour towns in Norway contain rat bones. There are no finds of black rats from the many archaeological excavations in rural areas or from the inland town of Hamar. These results show that it is extremely unlikely that rats accounted for the spread of plague to rural areas in Norway. Archaeological evidence from other Nordic countries indicates that rats were uncommon there too, and were therefore unlikely to be responsible for the dissemination of human plague. We hypothesize that the mode of transmission during the historical plague epidemics was from human to human via an insect ectoparasite vector.     

瘟疫何以肆虐?——一项医疗环境史的研究

"瘟疫何以肆虐"的问题,既与环境史相关,亦与医疗社会史不可分,但并不能用其中任何一者涵盖之;由此,我们提出"医疗环境史"的概念,以黑死病为个案,围绕瘟疫本身进行环境分析。在14世纪英国的聚落环境中,传染源普遍存在,鼠、蚤、人紧密共存,便于瘟疫的传播;交通运输的便利,利于瘟疫的跨聚落和跨地区流传;落后的医疗防治水平不能阻止瘟疫的肆虐,甚至会因不合理的举措而适得其反。上述病发、流传和应对环境还存在地区性的差异,从而导致瘟疫肆虐程度之不同。     

Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England

This review article of Mavis Mate's Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (1998) locates Mate's work within the broader context of the debate about changes in women's social position caused by the collapse in population following the Black Death. Was demographic decline accompanied by growing social and economic opportunities for women or should historians emphasise the continuity of female work as low‐skilled, low‐status and low‐paid throughout the late medieval and early modern periods? How did women's role in the labour market affect the age of marriage, fertility rates and long‐term population change? In general, Mate's conclusions offer support to the ‘pessimists’: women's work was vital to the household but economic centrality did not bring a commensurate social power or legal rights and the ideology of female subordination remained firmly in place. The main problem with Mate's case is, inevitably, a lack of evidence, for family structure, for the sexual division of labour and, above all, for affective relations. Nevertheless, this detailed, empirically based local study shows how successfully women's history has moved into the historical mainstream.     

Western plague literature,the Irish Famine and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

This article places Castle Richmond, Anthony Trollope’s controversial Irish Famine novel, within the context of Western plague narratives as outlined by recent plague narrative scholars and by René Girard in his seminal 1974 essay “The Plague in Literature and Myth”. By demonstrating Castle Richmond’s conformity to a very particular cluster of attributes found in Western plague literature, this article helps expand our reading of Trollope’s novel, a work that is otherwise often seen as an incoherent failure. This article proposes that Trollope used Western plague discourse to structure and organise his response to Ireland’s Great Hunger. I contend here that we see in his novel’s construction the scaffolding of Judaic, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Renaissance plague narrative traditions, traditions that follow a predictable pattern of transgression, punishment, near social collapse, atonement achieved by expelling or sacrificing a scapegoat or scapegoats, followed by the restoration of an improved social order. This line of reasoning encapsulates Castle Richmond’s overt logical structure. Yet, this article goes on to argue that there are numerous ways in which Trollope undermines the logical “inevitability” and the “divine ordination” of the Famine which his use of Western plague discourse implies.     

Walsingham Priory,a Memoir Read at the Meeting of the Institute in Cambridge,June, 1854 : With an Account of Recent Discoveries

The conventional wisdom on the origins and purpose of homestead moats is that they functioned as indicators of status. But that makes no distinction between manorial and homestead moats, and fails to take account of the combination of circumstances in early fourteenth-century England that resulted in a subsistence crisis of devastating proportions: the worst, it is now believed, in our recorded history. In 1300, many rural areas were already dangerously overcrowded. But it was the Agrarian Crisis of 1315–22, starting with back-to-back harvest failures and the Great European Famine of 1315–17, that caused the starving ‘undersettles’ to turn to crime and brought a tide of criminal violence to the localities. Harvests improved, but the violence continued until the Black Death (1348–49), fuelled by poverty and unprecedented taxes. And it is the argument of this paper that homestead moats, far from being the trophy assets of a would-be gentry class, were in reality precautions against the criminal activity to which all well-off householders were exposed.     

Natural Law in Dryden’s Translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio

This article examines the influence of natural law philosophy upon four of Dryden’s translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio published in his final collection Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700): “Sigismonda and Guiscardo”, “The Wife of Bath, her Tale”, “Palamon and Arcite” and “Cymon and Iphigenia”. Situating Dryden’s tales alongside the writings of his philosophical, political and literary contemporaries as well as their classical sources, it argues that Dryden’s distinctive choice of vocabulary and innovative amplifications of his originals constitute a subtly provocative interrogation of the use of natural law rhetoric within the seventeenth century.