The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

Author:John Kelly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780060006938
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2005-01-30T08:00:00+00:00

The Dorset coast is full of brooding Heathcliff vistas—windswept moors, moody gray skies, furiously moving clouds, turbulent reefs, and towering, chalk-faced cliffs, some so sheer they seem to have been cleaved from continental Europe with an ax. Here and there, nestled amid rock and wind and sea, are dozens of little coastal towns like Melcombe and its neighbors: Poole, Bridport, Lyme Regis, Wareham, and West Chickerell. In the Middle Ages, the towns were all sleepy little places where the same two hundred or three hundred sets of genes would chase one another around for centuries, and the rhythm of daily life was as unalterable as sea and sky. In the rainy autumn of 1348, this predictability begins to shatter. The secular records provide brief glimpses of the plague’s early progress through the coastal southwest, but the ecclesiastical rolls—especially the meticulously kept clerical mortalities—offer the most sustained view.

In the clerical records, if not in real life, the Black Death begins like a classic English mystery, perhaps an Agatha Christie thriller called Who Is Killing the Priests of Coastal England? In October—a few months after Y. pestis arrives in Melcombe*—West Chickerell to the north and Warmwell and Combe Kaynes to the east suddenly lose priests; in November the clerical death wave spreads to nearby Bridport, East Lulworth, and Tynham, and in December to Settisbury, also nearby, which has to appoint three priests before finding one who won’t die on the town. John le Spencer was appointed to a clerical post in Settisbury on December 7, 1348; three days later he was succeeded by Adam de Carelton, who in turn was succeeded on January 4 by Robert de Hoven. In the last two months of 1348, thinly inhabited Dorset had to fill thirty-two clerical vacancies—fifteen in November and seventeen in December, an astonishing replacement rate. And the clerical deaths were just the beginning.

All along the coastal southwest in the black autumn of 1348, the living gathered in the rain to bury the dead. In Poole, to the east of Melcombe, the grave diggers worked to the roar of the pounding surf rolling across the Baiter, a sandy tongue of land converted into a seaside cemetery. In 1348 and early 1349, little Poole seems to have buried the better part of itself in the channel sand. One hundred fifty years later there were still so many abandoned buildings in the town, Henry VIII took time out from his complicated romantic affairs to order their repair. Centuries later, locals were still pointing out the Baiter and regaling visitors with stories of the terrible autumn of 1348, when death and rain howled down upon the town. To the west of Melcombe, in Bridport, which was famous for making the best nautical rope in England, townsfolk buried their dead with a dogged devotion to English legalism. To ensure that every death was properly recorded and processed, in the winter of 1348–49 Bridport doubled its normal complement of bailiffs from two to four. The ecclesiastical records also highlight what may have been the first metastasis of the pestilence.

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