The Black Death

‘In the Hôtel-Dieu at Paris,’ continued the chronicler, ‘so great was the mortality that for a long time more than five hundred corpses were carted daily to the churchyard of St Innocent to be buried.’ Cardinal Gasquet has suggested that this is a misprint for fifty.^{145} Certainly the latter figure is probably nearer reality but there seems little reason to doubt that William of Nangis would have preferred the larger, more imposing total. ‘And those holy sisters,’ he continued, ‘having no fear of death, tended the sick with all sweetness and humility, putting all honour [sic ?fear] behind their back. The greater number of these sisters, many times renewed by death, now rest in peace with Christ, as we must piously believe.’ Such examples of self-abnegation were rare enough to deserve special mention; for the most part, in Paris as in every other city, the rule of the day was sauve-qui-peut. Charity, if it was to be found at all, began at home and ended there. Even the priests ‘retired through fear’, leaving the sick to shrive themselves or, if they were lucky, to gain the attention of a mendicant friar.

When the pastors set such an example it was hardly surprising that their flocks should follow suit. In the benighted city, where it seemed death to wander abroad, only those servants of death, the grave-diggers, felt themselves free to travel where they would. The rich and privileged fled, the poor remained to drown their fear in looted liquor and die in their hovels. Under the surface scum of terror and disorder ordinary decent men continued to behave in an ordinary, decent way; the life of the city fitfully continued. But to the casual visitor it must have seemed that society had disintegrated, that the plague must rage until there was not a home inviolated, not a Parisian alive. If it was not to be the end of the world, it seemed at least the end of the established order.

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From Paris the plague moved northwards to the coast, which it reached in or a little before August 1348. In this area, exceptionally, the winter checked the violence of the epidemic but with the spring it returned, evidently in its more virulent pulmonary form. The King had fled from Paris to Normandy but the plague was quick to follow him. At Rouen, where an over-excited contemporary calculated the dead at a hundred thousand, the Duke of Normandy donated land for a new graveyard. At Bayeux the Bishop and many canons died. At La Graverie, about four miles from Vire, ‘the bodies of the dead decayed in putrefaction on the pallets where they had breathed their last.’ A black flag flew above the church as it did in all the worst affected villages of Normandy.^{146}

La Léverie was a village within the parish of La Graverie. The lady of the manor died and her relatives wished to bury her in the churchyard. But no priest of La Graverie remained alive to conduct the service and there was no sign of a new incumbent being appointed. The relatives appealed to the priest of neighbouring Coulonces who was happy to bury the deceased but drew the line at visiting La Graverie, because of the danger of infection, and was equally reluctant to accept the corpse in Coulonces for fear of contaminating his so far inviolate village. So this lady was buried in the park of her own manor and the grateful relatives arranged the transfer of La Léverie from the parish of La Graverie to the parish of Coulonces.

St Marie Laumont in the same area lost four hundred people, or over half the population. The epidemic there raged for three months and had ended by September 1348. Amiens, it seems, must have suffered a second attack or perhaps, as occasionally happened in the larger cities, wasted away gradually over a year or more rather than succumbed to a brief but shattering epidemic. As late as June 1349 the King authorized the Mayor to open a new cemetery on the grounds that: ‘The mortality… is so marvellously great that people are dying there suddenly, as quickly as between one evening and the following morning and often quicker than that.’^{147} Meanwhile the Black Death seeped across every corner of France. Bordeaux it had reached in August 1348 and there caught and killed Princess Joan, daughter of King Edward III of England, on her way to marry the son of the King of Castile. The news of her death reached England at much the same time as the plague itself.

To the North East the Black Death moved slowly on towards Flanders and the Low Countries. ‘It is almost impossible,’ wrote Gilles Li Muisis^{148} ‘to credit the mortality throughout the whole country. Travellers, merchants, pilgrims and others who have passed through it declare that they have found cattle wandering without herdsmen in the fields, towns and waste-lands; that they have seen barns and wine-cellars standing wide open, houses empty and few people to be found anywhere…. And in many different areas, both lands and fields are lying uncultivated.’