In the Wake of the Plague by Norman F. Cantor

Author:Norman F. Cantor
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2017-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

The case of the le Strange family demonstrates well what the Black Death and the courts could do to an unlucky upper-class family. The le Stranges lived in Whitchurch in Shropshire in the black-earth, high-grain-yielding country intensely competed for by gentry families. The rich le Stranges were ambitious and on the rise, and because of their upward mobility were starting to make marriages in some instances with younger daughters of the nobility.

But the le Strange family was exceptionally unlucky in losing male family members during three successive outbreaks of the plague—two in 1349, and one each in 1361 and 1375. By 1375 not even the relative fecundity of the family in producing sons for the next generation could help them escape extinction in the male line. The plague had eliminated sons and left ambitious dowagers.

The le Stranges going back to the 1330s were not originally a great gentry house. They were a family on the make, principally through marriages with rich women, plus good estate management. The enhancement of family fortunes was launched by the marriage of John le Strange the First to a wealthy gentry heiress, Anakretta le Botiler. In the next two generations the le Strange heirs married into the nobility. This raised their social and political profile and with luck would have accrued vast landed wealth to the family.

But the Black Death countered that luck. Fulk le Strange, John I’s eldest son, married Elizabeth, the daughter of Earl Ralph of Stafford. Earl Ralph drove a hard marriage bargain. Fulk’s father, Ralph Stafford insisted, had to settle land worth two hundred marks a year (about a half-million dollars) jointly on the couple. This meant that if both John I and Fulk died close in time to each other and Fulk’s marriage to the heiress Elizabeth Stafford was short, the le Strange estate would be affected severely by loss of income from land held as dower for the widow.

Fulk le Strange died in the Black Death on August 30, 1349. But Elizabeth Stafford lived to a ripe old age by medieval standards, not dying until 1376. During those three decades Elizabeth not only collected dower from her deceased husband’s estate but remarried twice, taking with her the succulent property that John I le Strange had to settle jointly on his son Fulk and Elizabeth Stafford to get Earl Ralph’s permission for the marriage. The land thus eventually passed to the family of Reginald, Lord Cobham, Elizabeth Stafford’s third husband.

The story gets worse and more complicated for the pathetic le Stranges. Not only did Fulk le Strange, the elder son and prime heir of John I, die in the Black Death in August 1349, but the old man himself, John I le Strange of Whitchurch, had died of the plague only five weeks earlier. For a rich gentry family this blow was equivalent to a 60 percent crash in the stock market today—if every single asset was held in stock.

Anakretta le Botiler survived her husband, John I le Strange, until the next visitation of the plague in 1361.

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