ABSTRACT
The Black Death arrived in England through one of the southwestern ports in June or July 1348. By November it reached London, and in the following year it spread through all of England. The chroniclers of the time are of little help in establishing the scale of the epidemic, favoring apocalyptic hyperbole often copied from previous accounts. The basic textbook assumption is that between one third and one half of the English population perished in the first outbreak of plague. Russell put the national rate at twenty percent (367). However, subsequent studies have disputed both his figures and his methods (Titow 1969, 66–72; Hatcher 1977). 1 The major obstacle to understanding the complete effects of the plague is the uneven mortality rate among differing socio-economic and occupational groups. Historians therefore have turned to measuring a sample of different population groups. For example, the death rate for beneficed clergy was around forty percent, and for tenants in chief, only twenty-seven percent (Hatcher 1977, 21–22). Yet these groups were better off than the peasants and urban poor; they lived in better-constructed homes, could flee to other areas when the plague came, and had access to medical help, such as it was. For a more perfect understanding of the fearsome mortality, historians turned towards the peasantry, who made up the majority of the medieval English populace. Even here, however, the calculated death rates vary widely. For the peasantry, Levett thought a death toll of over one third was too high, based on her research on the tenants of St. Albans (80–81). For the manor of Lakenheath, Bailey estimated that about one third of the tenants died in 1349 (1995, 7). For the lands of the Abbey of Halesowen, Razi calculated that about forty percent of the tenants died in the initial outbreak of the plague (1980, 101–107). Poos’s data for Essex suggest a rate of forty-five percent among peasant tithingmen (1991, 107). While they omitted 1348/49 from their study of Winchester heriots, Postan and Titow estimated tenant mortality was nearly fifty percent, and overall was higher still (170–171).
