In the Wake of the Plague Page 5

  To us the lives of John of Gaunt, the royal duke of Lancaster who bestrode not only England but France and Spain like a colossus for two decades, and his little sister Joan, dead at fifteen on her way to marry a Castilian prince, seem like a study in sharp contrast, indeed, a pathetic one.

  But it cannot be overemphasized: to the high nobility of mid-fourteenth-century Europe this facile contrast was not evident. In aristocratic consciousness, John and Joan alike lived out their royal, hyperaristocratic lives, the ones that God and faith had allotted them. Their individual selves weighed equally in the balance of life and history.

  The great nobility were not reflective people, even if they were connoisseurs of art, collectors of rare books, and patrons of scholars, poets, and theologians. These latter high cultural pursuits, to which the Lancastrian family actually inclined, were considered in context: just part of a showy, expensive existence. In this life, a prized horse was the same as a patronized poet, elaborate sexual experience the same as none at all, their immensely showy clothes and exquisite dinners just part of the diurnal process—like breathing and sleeping.

  This was what they were. They were tactile, existential personages, not reflecting on long-range or even tomorrow’s significations. They were born to immeasurable wealth and great station; they behaved accordingly, in that way no different psychologically from the peasants who numbly pushed plows and existed on porridge. You played the hand you were dealt, the life to which Christ had called you, and then it was over, frequently in childhood or adolescence, almost never after the age of fifty.

  The nobility lived these short lives without a sense of irony. Funeral sermons delivered over the coffins by mumbling bishops might indeed expatiate on the shortness and fragility of human life. But the nobility did not act that way, preferring more the visceral contact of the hunting dogs and hawks they loved than the anxiety-ridden, memory-dominated self-consciousness of affluent and well-educated people today.

  This life was lived by very few. In 1340, 60 percent of Western Europe’s wealth and nearly all its political power were in the hands of some three hundred families of the higher nobility, of which there were about four dozen in England. Their wealth was literally incalculable, since it was never assessed or audited. But the income of each family was at least a billion dollars a year in today’s money.

  There was plenty of talk among these four dozen families about their own political power. They were the “first estate” or political class of the nation. In England the head of each billionaire high noble family, and often his heir as well, along with some thirty bishops, was summoned by personal invitation of the king to sit in what was coalescing as the House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber. The House of Lords had both great legislative and legal power (the highest court in England is still the House of Lords; their work is actually done by twenty-five professional lawyers given noninheritable titles for life).

  Yet the first estate rarely played an important role in politics, legislation, and law. Contrary to the anachronistic liberal dreams of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians, the great aristocracy in the fourteenth century did not accomplish much in politics and legislation. Whenever they bestirred themselves to take an active role, after generating a momentary crisis by impeding the royal administrators and drawing up some sonorous oligarchic reform placing the government in their own hands, they very quickly lost interest. The only issue that could truly engage the House of Lords for a few months was the hateful pursuit of some royal favorite, usually gay. That normally ended in violence and the great men then dispersed to their country estates and resumed their well-tilled behavior of feasting, drinking, hunting, and sex.

  The impact of the plague on the higher nobility was individual rather than collective. Their cash flow was so huge, their lifestyle so lavish, that they had a significant influence on the economy. Thousands of people in food purveying, building, luxury clothes, household services, horse breeding, as well as weapons manufacture and many more trades and subtrades found much of their market in satisfying the few dozen at the very top of the social ladder.

  The pace of life these top nobility set and the luxury goods they cultivated also had the effect of pressing the less affluent nobility and the upper stratum of the middle-class gentry to imitate them as far as more constrained resources allowed. Living on credit became as common among the landed classes as it is in American society today. The Florentine and southern French bankers allowed huge debts to be run up at very high interest rates. The bankers’ loans were ultimately safe if given to the highest of the aristocrats because their immense wealth—however lavish their spending—eventually made repayment probable. This was the conventional wisdom with the greatest borrower of them all, King Edward III—until he had to float such huge loans to fund his wars that he finally defaulted, sending a couple of illustrious Florentine banking houses down in flames.

  Here then is the peculiar way that the Black Death ultimately affected the awesome Plantagenet family. When Princess Joan was struck down, the dynastic union with Castile was precluded. Even later invasions of Spain, first by the Black Prince and then by John of Gaunt, could not compensate for the lost political advantage of this failed union. But by striking down Henry of Grosmont the plague opened the way for John of Gaunt to inherit the vast dukedom of Lancaster, an event that centrally shaped the next century of English political history and split the Plantagenet family.

  In view of the Florentine moneylenders, this was a very good thing. John of Gaunt was able to remain solvent, and set the leading edge in the billionaire lifestyle. He built the biggest house in London, which was burned down by angry peasants in 1381.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lord and Peasants

  IN THE YEARS OF THE Black Death England was still an intensely rural society. Ninety percent of the population lived on the land, engaging in intensive cereal agriculture, sheep and cattle ranching, or both. The country’s largest city, London, did not have more than 75,000 people. There were three towns in the 5,000 to 10,000 range—York in the north, Bristol in the west, and Lincoln in the central region. There were perhaps twenty more towns, crossroads on highways and locations for annual commercial fairs or church centers, in the 500 to 5,000 population category. But in these small towns many of the population were still engaged in agriculture in the surrounding countryside.

  Nevertheless, England was a wealthy society. Different regions excelled at different kinds of agriculture. North of Cambridge to Liverpool was ranching country, dominated by huge sheep and cattle granges. In this northern region there were four or five times the number of four-footed domestic beasts as human beings. The sheep produced millions of pounds of high-grade wool per year. It was baled and exported to the industrial textile cities of Flanders (Belgium), such as Ghent and Ypres, and even further afield to Italy.

  At least a third of the raw wool came from the estates of church corporations, particularly Cistercian monasteries. They had received unused scrub land from lay patrons in the twelfth century and had turned these hills into great sheep ranches. The Cistercian monks became so rich that secular lords imitated on a grand scale the ranching development the monks had pioneered. (The Cistercians are still today assiduous businessmen. The Trappist jam and “monk’s bread” we buy in supermarkets today are products of their inheritors, the name a seventeenth-century derivation of the medieval Cistercian Order.)

  An elaborate collection, retrieval, baling, and shipping system carried the wool to southern and eastern ports to be shipped to the Continent, particularly to Calais in northern France, a distribution center. The royal government since 1275 imposed an export tax called “the Great Custom” on this wool, producing in 1340 about 5 percent of the annual income of the Crown. The government, the landlords, and merchants represented in Parliament were forever disputing whether the custom rate on wool should be raised to give the king more income. This was still a contentious issue in the seventeenth century.

  By 13
48, perhaps 10 percent of the raw wool was retained at home, not exported. Entrepreneurs were setting up a native cloth industry, which would expand rapidly in the following century. The cloth was produced not in congregated factories as in modern times, but in the homes of peasants. Agents of the capitalists would go out periodically and give instruments and raw wool to the domestic spinners, collect the cloth they had produced since the last visit, and pay them. Historians have called this prefactory organization the domestic or putting-out system.

  Old sheep were slaughtered for their meat after years of giving wool, providing the prized mutton chops for middle-class and working-class tables. (Lamb chops were almost unheard of—the young sheep were too valuable for their wool.) The millions of cattle that grazed on the slopes of northeastern hills were wanted for their leather but especially for their red meat. The Anglo-Saxons who conquered Roman Britain between A.D. 400 and 600, like other Germanic peoples, were intensely carnivorous, devourers of red meat. The more affluent classes ate nothing else, except for occasional exotic fowl, morning, noon, and night.

  For centuries red meat had been amply available in the form of venison from deer slain in the forests. But over the centuries the forests had been greatly reduced in size for purposes of agricultural development and peasants’ village settlement. By the fourteenth century the unquenched English upper-class appetite for red meat could only be satisfied by the raising and slaughtering of domesticated cattle.

  Animals raised under crowded conditions were prone to cattle epidemics, of which the most menacing was anthrax. Some time in the fourteenth century, probably around 1340, a strain of anthrax was communicated to humans just as the origins of HIV/AIDS came from transmittal of infectious disease from chimpanzees to humans in East Africa some time between 1930 and 1950.

  Fourteenth-century doctors never identified the emergence of an anthrax epidemic among humans. Because the first stages of bubonic plague and anthrax are identical—flulike symptoms and high fever—they thought the anthrax attack on human society was the familiar bubonic plague. Some physicians were puzzled that a minority of plague victims never developed the distinguishing buboes, black welts around groins and armpits, that give bubonic plague its name.

  They did not draw the conclusion that some of the pestilence’s victims were actually succumbing to anthrax. In spite of the crowded conditions today on western American beef-producing ranches, anthrax is now prevented by annual inoculation of vaccines. Otherwise it would likely spread as in the great ranches of northern England and the small pasturages in the south in the fourteenth century.

  The central and much of the southwestern part of England was called champion (open field) country—the rich agricultural, cereal-growing heartland that produced at least half the country’s wealth. Because of advantages of soil and weather conditions, this farmland was agriculturally among the most productive in the world. Only the Ukraine and parts of western Canada and the U.S.A. are as propitious for growing grain as the champion part of England, about 40 percent of its total land mass.

  From 1870 to 1940 short-sighted governmental policies involved the abandonment of much of this intensive agriculture and the English ate bread made from Canadian and American grain. During World War II, because of the effectiveness of the German U-boat blockade until 1943, the British government tried desperately to reverse this forsaking of the land, dispatching “land girls” from the city and even professors from Oxbridge to hastily resurrect farm production, with modest results.

  Down in the English southwest in the counties of Devon and Cornwall and in Wales, which the English crown had conquered in the late thirteenth century, the land was mostly too chalky or rocky for agriculture, and the population was thin and impoverished. Coastal villages lived off smuggling. In Wales a primitive coal industry was slowly emerging, because by deforesting their once richly wooded country, the English had begun to experience early signs of a puzzling trend toward a fuel shortage that would become critical by 1500.

  In south central England, the heart of champion farmland, however, the century from 1180 to 1280 had been the medieval golden age because of favorable climatic conditions. The climate of the northern hemisphere, including England, experiences alternating cycles of warming and cooling. A warming trend had set in during the early twelfth century and it reached its height in the century after 1180. It was a time of long, warm summers and moderate winters. There always seemed to be enough rain to make the cereal crops sprout fervently. There were no crop failures or famines.

  More rural working-class young people, whose diets were heavily dependent upon cereals, survived to adulthood, and life expectancy was extended. The rural population skyrocketed, tripling in the thirteenth century. By 1280 England’s population was approaching six million people, three-quarters crowded into the agricultural south central heartland. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century would England’s population again rise to six million (it is sixty million today in a heavily urbanized society).

  The downside of good weather and sharply rising population was an unprecedented boom in agricultural real estate. The thirteenth century in England was a time of land hunger. Every arable inch in the rich black earth champion central region was put under the plow. Millions of acres were deforested and settled with peasant villages. The space preserved for grazing cattle and sheep in each village was cut back. Less attractive land, on hillsides or on more chalky soil up to now ignored, fell to efforts at cultivation. Aerial photographs today show the palimpsest of these villages created on marginal land and abandoned after the Black Death had reduced the rural population.

  The price of land on the rural market rose very rapidly and steeply in the thirteenth century. The royal courts were flooded with lawsuits over ownership of parcels of land and registration of land-purchase transactions. The new profession of common law attorneys learned their trade in complex land litigation in the county courts.

  The landlords pressed the royal government for a parliamentary statute that would unequivocally legalize the selling and buying of land and wipe away hoary restraints on rural capitalism derived from judicial detritus of earlier centuries. Courses on property law in the first year of American law schools today begin with this resulting statute of Quia Emptores of the 1290s, which unequivocally established a capitalist free market in the land.

  At the same time as land value kept increasing, landlord families got their lawyers to work out elaborate restraining documents preventing their heirs from ever selling off family properties. The noble and gentry landlords wanted to preserve the family estates intact to the end of time. These complex legal instruments, called entails, were still key plot devices in some of Jane Austen’s novels, written in the early years of the nineteenth century. In the 1670s a progressive judicial decision stipulated that land could only be entailed for one generation at a time, not perpetually. It was not until 1833 that the vestiges of the late-thirteenth-century entail system were finally abolished by act of Parliament.

  In the frenzy of the liberated capitalist land market, the legal status of serfdom that had been imposed on the peasantry around the beginning of the second Christian millennium became increasingly obsolete, pointless, and actually dysfunctional.

  Serfdom had been meant to ensure a steady supply of labor by legally tying generations of men to the land (if your father was a serf, you were one too). Serfdom exists where land is cheap and easily available but peasant labor to work the land is in short supply, as in the sixteenth-century Ukraine or eleventh-century England.

  English serfs were not slaves—human chattels as in the Roman Empire and American South. They had legal rights, and the system had heavy costs for their lords. Serfs had a right to strips of arable land of their own to work (after putting in around two-thirds of their time working the lord’s personal lands, called his demesnes). The serf villagers had a right to pasturage of a modest number of domesticated animals. They could hunt for boar and rabbits (not deer, which were reser
ved for the ruling class) in the neighboring forests or haul fish out of a nearby stream to eat on meatless Catholic Fridays and during Lent. They could plant and cultivate vegetable gardens next to their houses. The lord had to provide in each village a mill to grind the peasants’ grain for their heavily cereal diet. And not least, the lord of each peasant village had to build a humble church for the peasants and staff it with a more or less literate priest to perform church services.

  Serfdom should not be identified with a starving and abused peasantry. There were plenty of fat and prosperous serfs in England in the 1300s, like the kulaks in the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union.

  There were also in the thirteenth century ambitious serf families who sought freedom as their legal status. That would make them mobile; they or their sons could leave the ancestral village and set up a household elsewhere. As freemen they could accumulate land from neighboring peasants through purchase and emerge as what around 1400 came to be called yeomen—free peasants. Those yeomen families with vaulting ambition aimed to marry or buy their way into the lower echelon of the gentry class, the landlord class.

  After 1180 manumission of serfs became a steadily increasing trend, as with the population boom landlords realized that the old labor shortage had been superseded by a fluid labor supply. Now there were strong peasant backs and calloused hands to hire as laborers on monthly or yearly contracts. The labor market—turning steadily more advantageous to the lords in the century after 1180 as the rural population expanded—meant that the costs and restraints that serfdom imposed on the lord could be rudely jettisoned. Now the landlord could just hire workers in exchange for cash. As the villagers grew older and less capable of hard labor, the lord would not renew their contracts and would turn them loose on the highways, and into the town and forests. The towns restricted immigration. In the forests, if the peasants were not too old they could join criminal groups, such as the one headed by Robin Hood.