In the Wake of the Plague Page 4

  Princess Joan traveled with a portable chapel so she could enjoy Catholic services and sacraments without having to use local churches and encounter commoners in her travels southward. The lavish private chapel featured a couch decorated with fighting dragons and a border of vines, powdered throughout with gold Byzantine coins. The vestment cloth meant to cover an altar table was decorated with serpents and dragons.

  Among the silver vessels was an incense burner valued at half a million dollars in today’s money and a silver chalice also of similar value. It was a long way from the Sermon on the Mount.

  The mayor of Bordeaux in August 1348, Raymond de Bisquale, greeted the princess and her large entourage and escorted them to the Château de l’Ombriere, the old Plantagenet castle on the estuary overlooking the port. Mayor Raymond commented to Joan and her three leading officials, the former royal chancellor Robert Bouchier; the diplomatic lawyer Andrew Ullford; and the local cathedral priest, Gerald de Podio, that plague was causing trouble in Bordeaux.

  Hundreds of cadavers with the dreadful buboes, black welts under the armpits and around the groin, were piling up in the streets and on the docks. The stench was almost unbearable. But medieval lords were used to bad smells. They took care of them by holding silk handkerchiefs drenched in perfume to their noses.

  The royal entourage ignored the mayor’s warning about the plague. The princess and her companions proceeded to settle comfortably into the royal château even though it was located in a dangerous place near docks swarming with plague-carrying rats.

  The royal castle was situated close to the main port area by the estuary of the Gironde on which Bordeaux is located. Like very rich people in all times and places, the Plantagenets built their establishments on prime real estate located on the water if it was at all feasible. But this old and expensive part of town was particularly affected by the plague, which tended to travel along the river trade routes, often in bales of cloth, which could house rats carrying infected fleas ready to migrate onto warm human bodies. At Narbonne, at the southern end of Gascony near the Spanish border, and a town which the princess and her entourage would certainly have stayed before they crossed into Spain, the plague similarly began among the dyers working in factories along the river.

  In Bordeaux, among the bales of wool and cloth that stood on the quays next to the huge barrels of red wine destined for England, rats scurried around carrying the infectious bacilli.

  Very soon the fifteen-year-old princess watched as her companions fell sick and died of the plague. A year later her father the king and her brother Edward the Black Prince fled with their entourages to distant estates and castles in England. Whether by this flight into remote areas or by sheer luck, they saved themselves. It did not occur to the little princess and her upscale advisors to get out of town. They stayed at the very center of the pestilence raging in Bordeaux, with devastating consequences.

  The royal château overlooking the water became a charnel house of horror. Robert Bourchier, the chancellor who had survived the Battle of Crecy, was one of the first to be struck down by the plague. He died on August 20. On September 2 Princess Joan died, a deep personal and major diplomatic setback for Edward III.

  Andrew Ullford the lawyer and diplomat was not affected by the plague (he in fact resumed a busy diplomatic career and died ten years later on a mission to the Roman curia in Avignon). Now Andrew took off for England and on October 1 reported to the king what had occurred. The princess was dead of the plague.

  King Edward immediately sent a letter to King Alfonso of Castile terminating the marriage arrangements and concluded with traditional and formal piety: “We have placed our trust in God and our life between His hands where He held it closely through many dangers.” Edward had already married off his other daughter to an English earl. He had no more female progeny with whom to further pursue the marriage and strategic alliance with Castile.

  Yet Castile remained a ghostly, beckoning specter in the Plantagenet consciousness. Princess Joan’s brothers the Black Prince and John of Gaunt were each to make noisy and bloody expeditions into Spain in the following decades to try to carve out spheres of English dominance there by direct and forceful means. Neither of these expeditions led to any permanent consequences. The Spaniards were too good as fighters and politically more savvy (or treacherous) than even the Plantagenet dynasty.

  The fate of Pedro’s minstrel sent to England to saturate Joan with Spanish songs is unknown. Probably he died in Bordeaux of the plague. Robert Bourchier’s body was brought back to England, and he was buried at a small monastery he had endowed in the county of Essex.

  There is no record of Princess Joan’s body being returned to London, nor any account of her funeral, which would have been a well-appreciated event. This strange lacuna was not due to Edward’s negligence. No medieval king allowed his daughter’s body to disappear abroad unburied.

  On October 25, 1348, the king commissioned a northern ecclesiastical lord, the bishop of Carlisle, to go to dangerous plague-ridden Bordeaux and bring back the little princess’s body for burial in London. The bishop was generously allocated five marks (about two thousand dollars in our money) a day in expenses for this task. Undoubtedly Edward III overpaid the good bishop because of the health risk involved.

  It is just possible that the bishop chickened out and never dared go to plague-infested Bordeaux, which would have been a very rash default on his part. More likely Carlisle went to Bordeaux but could not retrieve Joan’s body because it had been turned to anonymous ashes in the general conflagration that had engulfed the port area.

  In Bordeaux the port area was so badly affected by plague (everyone died there of this great mortality, remarked a contemporary French chronicler) that Mayor Raymond de Bisquale decided to set fire to the port area in the hope of stopping the spread of the epidemic. The flames and smoke of the burning port could be seen for miles.

  The physicians the mayor consulted, if they did not blame the whole biomedical disaster on insalubrious astrological signs, would have told the mayor that the plague passed through the polluted air from the mouth of a sick to a healthy person.

  But the fire in the port got out of control and destroyed some valuable housing quite a distance from the port area, as we know from a later lawsuit. The flames engulfed the royal château on the estuary and, in all likelihood, took Joan’s remains with it.

  This sad end for the royal princess heightened the king’s grief. In his letter to King Alfonso of Castile on September 15, 1348, Edward referred to “the intense bitterness of heart” at what had happened. The princess was a martyred angel looking down from Heaven to protect the king and the royal family: “We give thanks to God that one of our own family free from all stain [she was after all a virgin] whom we have loved with our life has been sent ahead to Heaven to reign among the choir of virgins, where she can gladly intercede for our offenses before God Himself” (translated by R. Horrox).

  Considering that Edward III with his son the Black Prince had laid waste to about 25 percent of the present-day western third of France and caused the deaths through violence and famine of hundreds of thousands of noncombatant peasants and urban workers, Joan the angelic virgin had her work cut out for her.

  Mayor Raymond de Bisquale of Bordeaux, though he did not share the Plantagenet success in politics, was luckier in health and survived the plague. But its effects on this rich port city and the surrounding lush agricultural areas, including the vineyards, was severe.

  The banlieue (surrounding territory) of Bordeaux was devastated by the plague, compounding serious damage already inflicted by ten years of fighting in the Hundred Years War. In February 1365, the chapter of the cathedral of St. Andrew asked to recover its land tenements in the village of St. Julien, just south of the town walls, because they had been vacant for twenty years or more. The tenants were dead and no one had come forward to lay claim to the holdings or pay rent. The houses had fallen into disrepair and were deserted and abandone
d.

  The cathedral dean and chapter did not know whether any heirs to the properties survived. As a result proclamations were read four times in the largest church and the fifteen parochial chapels of Bordeaux calling on the heirs to come forward. On February 29, no claim having been presented, the tenements were held to have reverted to the hands of the dean and chapter.

  The accounts of the Archbishopric of Bordeaux revealed other cases of vacancy and decayed rents. In 1356 at la Souys, near Floirac, just across the Gironde from St. Julien, the vineyards lay abandoned. A mile to the north at Lormont thirteen holdings lay untenanted in 1361. In the same year there were seven deserted holdings at Pessac, which lay just beyond St. Julien and its superb vineyards.

  Initially precipitated by the war and exacerbated by the plague, the crisis in the wine trade, the major economic staple of Bordeaux, ran alongside this devastation of the countryside. In the first half of the fourteenth century between 725 and 1,360 ships a year set out for England carrying Gascon wine. Between October 8, 1349, and August 27, 1350, only 141 ships sailed.

  Although wine exports did not regain their preplague levels, demand in the English market did not fall significantly, with the result that Gascony enjoyed the partial compensation of a significant rise in price. Although it fell back later, it generally stood at one-third above its preplague level.

  The revival of the wine trade was accompanied by a process of rural reconstruction near Bordeaux, which began in 1355, intensified from 1363, and reached its peak in 1368. The Abbey of La Sauve made a systematic effort to repopulate its estates with peasants. As well as drawing on local families, immigrants arrived from the neighboring counties, and as far away as Brittany and Spain.

  The new tenancies incorporated conditions for the restoration of houses over a period of three or four years and for the customary maintenance of old vines and planting of new ones within four years. The resumption of its lands at St. Julien by the dean and chapter of St. Andrew in 1365 was a necessary preliminary to the process of reletting and reconstruction. The dean and chapter were making equivalent efforts in Graves. Similarly, in another prime wine-producing village, between 1366 and 1372, the chapter of St. Seurin and the seigneur of Castelnau relet abandoned holdings, imposing the condition that the new tenants replant the vines within six years.

  The death of the princess had brought home to the royal family back in England the seriousness of the threat presented by the plague. Peasants dying in manorial villages, mass graves in London and other cities—these portents initially alarmed the Plantagenet family and court. The devastation in Bordeaux, especially the death of a royal princess critically important in international politics, raised a grim spectral threat.

  The court escaped comparatively lightly from the plague of 1349. The king and his eldest son the Black Prince spent the summer months on the royal manors in southwest England well away from the principal centers of population and in an area of the country where the mortality was already passing its peak. But although most of the close companions of the royal family were spared, astonishingly, eventually there had to be an emotional impact that the mass mortality imposed on the royal family and the court. One of the best-recorded responses is the arrangements made for the burial of the dead. In 1349 Sir Walter Manny, one of Edward III’s great war captains, purchased a mass burial ground, the Spital Croft later called New Church Haw, and now the site of the Charterhouse.

  Although this may have been principally a practical and sanitary act, it had a pious aspect, reflected in the foundation of a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary within the burial ground. Manny secured a license from Pope Clement VI to transform the chapel into a secular college with thirteen chaplains. However, Manny changed his mind in 1371, a year before his death, and founded a Carthusian monastery (the Charterhouse) on the site.

  The Carthusians were the strictest of the religious orders, and Manny’s choice may have reflected the spirit in which he made the foundation. He left the monastery two thousand pounds ($7 million today) in his will and arranged for his own burial there, further signifying the importance he attached to his plague foundation.

  Edward III himself made a similar contribution to the salvation of the souls of the plague victims. In 1350 he purchased a plague cemetery close to the Tower of London, land originally acquired in the previous year by John Corey, a clerk from Holy Trinity Priory. It is probable that Corey was acting as the king’s agent. Edward founded a chapel dedicated to the Virgin, to whose intercession he attributed his own escape from many perils at land and sea.

  In part Edward’s gratitude reflects his thoughts about the dangers of war, but it must surely also bear some relation to the fact that he had been spared by the plague. Edward’s concern was principally a personal one rather than one of compassion for the mass of victims. Soon afterward, the foundation was transformed into a full-fledged Carthusian monastery of St. Mary Graces under the supervision of the old monastery at Beaulieu Regis, from which five monks were sent to man it.

  Edward’s original intention was to provide the new monastery with one thousand pounds sterling ($4 million) per annum. In fact Edward gave the foundation only some properties in Smithfield and a meager twenty marks a year, showing that the project had quickly slipped down his list of priorities. In 1358 he increased the annual grant to forty marks a year from the Exchequer, though he insisted on the addition of a further monk.

  In 1367 he granted the monastery income from two London churches and other rents in London worth one thousand pounds a year, fulfilling his original commitment. On his deathbed Edward made further grants on the scale that he had originally promised.

  The greatest lord and richest man in England outside the immediate royal family was Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, a much-admired veteran of the French wars. Grosmont was deeply moved by the plague. He survived the plague attack of the 1340s, only to succumb to a similar outbreak in 1361. In 1354 Grosmont set down, at the urging of his confessor, his thoughts on biomedical matters in a little Book of the Holy Doctors. It is a quite moving document reflective of the plague years.

  Among the personal weaknesses Grosmont acknowledged and set out to rectify was a disgust at the sick, which was so extreme that they were not even spared the scraps from his table. In the duke’s book, Christ the physician assisted by the Virgin Mary offers cures for the wounds of the soul infected with the seven deadly sins.

  Grosmont had been alerted to, if not entirely converted to austerity. He tells us that as a young man he had been tall and fair, fond of adornments such as rings and garters and with a proclivity for dancing. When he was older he had a dancing chamber in his castle at Leicester and a personal troupe of minstrels. He liked women and preferred those of low birth because they did not criticize him for his desires.

  He had the usual fondness of his class for hunting and warfare. Now that he was growing old, he still indulged in rich, spicy food with strong sauces—salmon and lamprey were his favorites and were bought for him at great cost.

  He also downed large quantities of claret and openly declared that he and his companions readily lost their senses in wine. What the book shows is Grosmont’s realization of the spiritual limitations of this lifestyle and the disparity between the luxury available to him and the uncomfortable lives of most of his fellow Englishmen.

  The same awareness is reflected in the arrangements made for his burial, on April 14, 1361, at the monastic college that he founded at Newark. He eschewed all military display—there were no armed men or horses with trappings. Instead the hearse bore five great candles of one hundred pounds each as well as four funeral lights and was preceded by fifty poor men, half of them in blue, the rest in white, each bearing a lighted torch. The royal family attended the funeral and the Black Prince placed two cloths of gold on Grosmont’s bier.

  Quite apart from personal loyalty the royal family had every reason to be there. Grosmont left no male heir, and when one of his two daug
hters, Maude, died soon afterward, the entire vast estate passed to his other daughter, Blanche, wife of the king’s younger son, John of Gaunt.

  The new duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, was Edward III’s second-eldest surviving son, after the Black Prince. When Edward died in 1377 the crown passed to young Richard II, the Black Prince’s son by the love of his life, the vivacious Princess Joan of Kent.

  The passing of the vast Lancastrian holdings and the ducal title to John of Gaunt destabilized the Plantagenet family, because John of Gaunt, now duke of Lancaster, could command as much property and as many soldiers as the rest of the royal family. Almost inevitably Henry of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s heir, threw out his gay cousin Richard II and seized the crown with parliamentary approval. Henry IV had Richard II taken to a bleak castle and probably starved to death.

  The rest of the Plantagenet family now coalesced slowly around the duke of York, descended from Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund of Langley. Thereby the stage was set for the twenty-five-year struggles between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which Victorian writers called the War of the Roses. It was the long, seemingly interminable civil war between Lancaster and York factions of the Plantagenet dynasty that made it impossible for the English to stand against the revived, Joan of Arc–inspired French monarchy in the 1440s and 1450s, which is how Bordeaux and its neighborhood and vineyards were lost.

  John of Gaunt got his peculiar name from the English pronunciation of Ghent, the Flemish industrial city where he was born to Edward’s Low Countries’ queen Phillipa of Hainault. John was the richest and most elegant and most feared lord on the European scene in his lifetime. He was a patron of scholars and poets. He protected the controversial and heretical theologian John Wycliff, a disgruntled Oxford academic who failed to get tenure, from onslaught by ecclesiastical courts.

  Gaunt was the main patron of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who worked as a diplomat representing the English crown on the continent when he was not enjoying the sinecure Lancaster awarded him, chief of collector of customs of the port of London, a sweetheart job. Chaucer’s wife was one in Gaunt’s large stable of mistresses.