The Black Death

Professor Renouard says that, though mortality in the French towns was terrifyingly high, the country escaped comparatively lightly.^{149} In many areas this was certainly true but, though Li Muisis’s account may well have been embellished in the interests of the picturesque, there are too many descriptions like it to accept Renouard’s statement as invariably valid. At Givry, a large Burgundian village near Chalon-sur-Saône of between twelve and fifteen hundred inhabitants, the average death rate in the years before the plague was thirty each year. Between 5 August and 19 November 1348 six hundred and fifteen people died. In Saint-Pierre-du-Soucy, a rural parish in Savoy, the number of households dwindled from one hundred and eight in 1347 to sixty-eight at the end of 1348 and fifty-five in 1349. In the seven neighbouring parishes, all farming communities with small and scattered populations, the number of households fell from three hundred and three to one hundred and forty-two.^{150} In areas such as these, at least, something close to half the population must have perished.

In the summer of 1349, the Black Death reached Li Muisis’s own city of Tournai. The Bishop, John de Pratis, was one of the first to die; then came a lull during which the citizens told themselves that they had been let off lightly. But by August the plague was raging with renewed strength:

Every day the bodies of the dead were borne to the churches, now five, now ten, now fifteen, and in the parish of St Brice sometimes twenty or thirty. In all parish churches the curates, parish clerks and sextons, to get their fees, rang morning, evening and night the passing bells, and by this the whole population of the city, men and women alike, began to be filled with fear.

The Town Council acted firmly to restore public confidence and check the collapse in moral standards which was likely, they feared, to bring down upon the city a still more ferocious measure of divine vengeance. Men and women who, although not married, were living together as man and wife were ordered either to marry at once or to break off their relationship. Swearing, playing dice and working on the Sabbath were prohibited. No bells were to be rung at funerals, no mourning worn and there were to be no gatherings in the houses of the dead. New graveyards were opened outside the city walls and all the dead, irrespective of their standing in the city or the grandeur of their family vaults, were in future to be buried there.

The measures seem to have been successful; if not in checking the Black Death then at least in raising the moral tone of the community. Li Muisis reported that the number of people living in sin dwindled rapidly, swearing and work on the Sabbath almost ended, the dice manufacturers became so discouraged with their sales-figures that they turned their products into ‘round objects on which people told their Pater Nosters.’ But gratifying though this must have been, the death roll was still terrifyingly high. ‘It was strange,’ said the chronicler, that ‘the mortality was especially great among the rich and powerful.’ Strange indeed, especially since he went on to comment: ‘Deaths were more numerous about the market places and in poor, narrow streets than in broader and more spacious areas.’ There seems no reason to doubt that in Tournai, as in every other city, the rich man who remained prudently secluded had a better chance of survival than the poor man who, like it or not, was forced to live cheek-by-jowl with his neighbours. But his chance was not necessarily a high one: ‘…no one was secure, whether rich, in moderate circumstances or poor, but everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord.’

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The Middle Ages were described by Koyré, the great historian of science, as the period of à peu près. Everything is seen through a glass darkly; though here and there it may be possible to identify detail with fair certainty, for the most part a bold, impressionistic picture is the best that can be hoped for. No more in France than in Italy can it be said what proportion of the population died. Gui de Chauliac spoke of three quarters, other chroniclers of half; Professor Renouard, who has studied the subject as closely as anyone, can do no better than estimate that the death rate varied from an eighth to two-thirds according to the area.