For those with a more apocalyptic cast of mind — and they are a constant proportion of us in any age — all this is further proof that we are entering an end time, where we fry in an earthly hell of our own creation. The most militant make public displays of their warnings, willing on the economic apocalypse: XR fanatics at the entrance of Downing Street are simply post-religious flagellants in not dissimilar dress.
Are things any different behind those famous gates? Modern government may be far more complex but the response is familiar. In 1349 the economy rapidly collapsed: workers who were not dead stayed at home for fear of infection, crops rotted in the fields and those willing to work would only do so at an extortionate rate.
Edward III — fabled in popular history, but a less appealing man the closer one inspects — was fortunate to be served by an extraordinarily capable treasurer, William Edington. In his hands, the Exchequer’s response was breathtaking in its innovation and scope. A royal ordinance was sent out fixing a maximum rate at which people could work, and infractions were prosecuted in special courts.
The receipts of the fines from these sessions were set against recent tax assessments, in recognition of the challenges that farms and businesses faced. The cost of manufactured goods was controlled by limiting the rates that craftsmen could charge, and to support prices — which had fallen — Edington undertook a massive recoinage, medieval quantitative easing on an industrial scale.
The precise target of these interventions may have been different from today’s Exchequer’s actions, but it had the same purpose: to maintain some sort of functioning economy through the disruption wrought by death after death after death.
Some communities worked out what they had to do to limit the mortality. When the disease entered Milan, the authorities closed the gates and bricked the sick up in their own homes. It was brutal but it worked.
The English made half-hearted attempts in the same direction. The burghers of Gloucester, close to the first urban hotspot of Bristol, closed the city gates “believing that the breath of those who had lived among the dying would be infectious”. Only here it was too late. In London, the Corporation had to take action within weeks to control profiteering out of the run on gloves.
Without a remedy, villagers could rely only on the care of the church, which had a solemn responsibility to provide the last rites that would ease the journey of the soul from this world to the next. More even than modern-day medics, the efforts of so many medieval clergy were heroic, as they knew that their work gave them an odds-on chance of death. The dedication of so many priests to their crucial tasks meant that many parishes went through two, three and more clerics in a matter of months, each dead priest replaced in a matter of days so that the cure of souls would not be held back.
What was left was desolation. Villages half-emptied of peasants; weeds in the fields where a new crop should have stood. Already, however, rural society was reconstituting. Huge swathes of land had, through inheritance and forced sale, changed hands. People lost their families but gained a legacy.
Widowed men and women everywhere hastily remarried, desperate to maintain the security that marriage then ensured. In the near term, survivors had no option but to get back on their feet and make the best of the situation that they could. For some this meant making use of opportunities that had unexpectedly come their way, but for most the imperative was merely subsisting from one day to the next.
“Many changes,” wrote an Irish scribe a year after the pestilence, had passed. Indeed, they had — and they lasted some time. The labour market had been significantly disrupted; building projects had been put on hold; prices went down and then up; the frontier relationships within our four nations had been redefined.
But over the years these changes ceased and then unwound. Some of those workers who had known the better pay they had enjoyed immediately after the Black Death bridled at the efforts of lords, parliament, judges and the king to return to the status quo ante — a memory that fired periodic outbursts of public anger, most famously in the Peasants’ Revolt. But by and large, the great arc of history was unbent by the Great Death.
For the medieval mind, this was a far easier outcome to comprehend than for us. In a pre-liberal worldview, one’s place in the world was divinely ordained, and change outside the turn of the seasons was neither inevitable nor expected.
It is a conclusion we find almost impossible to accept now — not just popularly, but as academic students too. Historians are biographers of an age, and like any biographer, we like to think our period was an agent of change. “Millions dead: things go on as before” makes for a poor quotation on the flyleaf of a new book.
And so the Black Death found itself posthumously responsible for changing almost everything: destroying feudalism, creating the middle classes, improving the lot of women, setting in motion the Reformation, ending the Decorated style of architecture and ushering in the Perpendicular, bringing forth our modern English tongue.
However, in as much as these developments did exist (and not all of them did) they all began long before the Great Death, whose effect on each was at most to accelerate an evolution that was already taking place.
In truth, that was not the conclusion I had expected to reach when I set out to write about the Black Death, but after spending so much time with this greatest pandemic in history, it was the only judgement I could honestly make.
And now I am back in a cottage in Suffolk, isolated, this time with a family, working my way through the effects of an epidemic. So the wheel of life turns again, almost full circle.
For Michael Gove, who sits where I once did, this thought should be a comfort, as he wrestles with the effects of a pandemic for real. For while he and his colleagues carry the awesome responsibility of helping us all get through this crisis, he should not worry about remaking the world in its wake.
We have been here before. Our response shows that our natural instincts to make sense of our own story remain intact. This pandemic will bring nothing to an end, nor create anything anew. When historians look back in seven centuries’ time, they will hopefully divine the truth of our age: that we were already embarked upon great change — coping with an ever more interconnected world, the dismemberment of traditional community, huge structural changes in the nature of work, and our existential effort to cease the wanton destruction of our planet and manmade climate change — well before pandemic flu temporarily stopped everything in its tracks.
Those accounts will tell of how, in recovery, it was the strength of the human spirit, and the families and communities that we create, that enabled us not only to pick up where we left off but to make full use of the opportunities that this hiatus offered us. It will be a reminder to another time that change is evidence of life, not the dead hand of pandemic death.
The Scouring Angel: the Black Death in the British Isles is published by Vintage.
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