Pandemic then and now (part 2)...

My current series of historical novels is set in the middle of the 14th century, a period (in)famous for its devastating plague. The events of the first novel occur just after the Black Death has passed on, and so don’t concern the plague itself but rather its consequences for a community that lost so many of its members. But I have recently published the fourth novel in the series, which, sadly, is at least partly “about” plague, which returned to England in 1361 (and many times thereafter).

I was still writing this fourth novel when the world was plunged into chaos by the arrival of COVID-19. Although it was unsettling writing about a pandemic when we were in the midst of one, it did give me food for thought, comparing the two events.

My last post on The History Girls blog, in May, related something of medieval people’s understanding of the reasons for the plague, focussing on the idea that “lewd” fashion, and indeed lewdness in general, might be responsible.

In today’s post, though, for what I think may be my last on The History Girls concerning plague, I thought I’d talk a little more about how medieval people responded to plague. It’s particularly interesting because there are a few fascinating parallels with our own responses to the 2020 pandemic.

In the 14th century, people had some curious (to us) notions about the causes of the disease. Death was of course everyday – accidents were commonplace, illnesses mostly incurable, and even untreatable, life generally subject to manifold risk. Medieval people had a tendency to credit adversity of any kind, be it the loss of a child, dead cows, a bad harvest, or the failure of the butter to churn, to God’s will or the Devil’s work.

Part of a mural in a church in Hrastovlje, Slovenia, painted at the end of the 15th century,

showing people of every rank and station being led by grinning skeletons towards a grave. 

National Gallery of Slovenia. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

We know well enough the medieval notion that the coming of the Black Death, or indeed any disaster, was the result of mankind’s sin. That was what the Church promulgated. However, even if this was the generally accepted view, ther were scientific explanations too. Various complicated theories about the movements of the planets were proposed, and also ideas that miasma, or foul air, was to blame. Foul air was thought to be a cause of disease in general, and plague was no different.

But, if medieval people had some notions of the cause of the disease (even if they were wrong), I imagine it was far trickier for them to work out how to deal with it.

Isolation, keeping oneself to oneself generally, was certainly understood. The value of social distancing, as we now call it, was recognised. The premise for Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed in 1353) is the isolation of a group of young people who flee Florence to escape the plague. And a 14th century French physician, Jean Jacmé, wrote in a treatise on the plague:

“In pestilence time nobody should stand in a great press of people because some man among them may be infected” *

So close contact with a victim was to be avoided. People did go into “lockdown”, confining themselves and their families to their homes, only going out “if absolutely necessary”, presumably to fetch water, buy food, tend to their animals or manage their land.

But Doctor Jacmé had some other familiar-sounding advice. He advocated the washing of hands “oft times in the day”*, though he recommended using water and vinegar, rather than soap.

Touch, then, was certainly to be avoided, but another physician posited that looking into a plague victim’s eyes was also risky, on the grounds that disease could be transmitted via the “airy spirit leaving the eyes of the sick man”*, which does seem somewhat less than plausible. But something much more familiar is avoiding a victim’s “foul air” – the emissions resulting from coughing or even breathing. The “plague doctor” bird beak masks of later centuries hadn’t yet been invented, but I can well imagine that those who attended victims might have covered their nose and mouth.

The 17th century equivalent of a “hazmat” suit?

Though these sorts of beak masks weren’t used in the 14th century.

(Copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel (Dr. Beak), a plague doctor in 17th century Rome.

Published by Paul Fürst (1608–1666) who was perhaps also the engraver. Public domain.)

What medieval people didn’t seem to know about, for I have seen no reference to it in the sources I have been reading, was the role of rats and fleas. Rats have long been implicated in the spread of plague, though some scientists now think the speed of spread was, in practice, too rapid and too far for transmission by rat flea alone to be viable. Others have it that the rat fleas jumped host to people, and then human fleas and body lice were infected, making it easier for rapid people-to-people transmission. Yet the situation is unclear. The World Health Organisation, speaking of the present time, says, “human to human transmission of bubonic plague is rare”. Yet, the 1361 outbreak was in the summer months, in which bubonic, as opposed to pneumonic, plague, was in principle more common. Whichever it was, it spread very quickly, and was undoubtedly hideous and terrifying.

Perhaps not quite the culprit he’s been made out to be? But not this cute either!

(Etching by W. S. Howitt, 1808. Wellcome Library, London. http://wellcomeimages.org. Public domain.)

And of course doctors in the 14th century really didn’t know how to treat the disease, though some undoubtedly thought they did. Some would probably have tried their favourite cure-all, blood-letting, or applied a variety of substances to the suffering body, from herbs and vinegar, to urine and excrement, none of which were beneficial. In my novel, I have a barber-surgeon lancing the buboes, a practice that wasn’t necessarily carried out in the 1300s, though it was a couple of centuries later. But I can imagine eager medieval surgeons trying various methods to save their patients, just as the university-trained physicians ceaselessly sought answers in the heavens. And, even in the 14th century, catching plague wasn’t absolutely a death sentence, for some people clearly did survive it – even people who had been close to, or even nursed, victims.

It’s been a strange year for all of us, and of course it’s not over yet. When I embarked upon writing the fourth novel, back in 2019, I could never have imagined how close to home the events I wrote about might seem. As the 2020 pandemic took off, I recoiled a little at that “closeness”. Yet, since then, I have welcomed the opportunity once more to compare experiences then and now, finding, as so often, that, despite the centuries between us, there is much that we share.

* Quotes are from The Black Death, translated and edited by Rosemary Horrox. If you’d like to read more about plague in the 14th century, I really do recommend it, for it has a wealth of fascinating detail, and uses contemporary texts to reveal the thinking of the time.

Flatulence, Indigestion, Black Death, not to mention Acne ... by Joan Lennon

The season of excess in food and drink is still strong in our memories, as are thoughts of ensuing digestive difficulties.  (If you type "Healthy January" into Google, you get something like 530 million links to click on.)  Indigestion and the "expelling of wind" were topics which also exercised the minds of medieval medical types considerably.*  Here are a few of the cures they proposed for those gut feelings:

- powdered bay leave taken with honey
- feverfew fried with wine and oil and applied to the belly
- the ingestion of mint, valerian, hemp seeds, cardamon seeds, fennel, cloves ... 
- borage, which had the added advantage of also being good for melancholy (Being overly windy can be depressing.)

A quite interesting thing about these cures was that they were also prescribed for plague**, acne and the bite of a mad dog.  The up side to this was that anyone unfortunate enough to be suffering from all these conditions simultaneously wouldn't have to spend time and money on taking different medicines.

I think I might just consider a bit of moderation.



* I thought this should perhaps be an image-free post.  You can thank me later.
** Other medieval cures for the black death included drinking powdered emeralds or molten gold, eating a spider inserted into a raisin, and the toad cure.  This involved a number of dead toads which you dried in the sun and then placed on the victim's boils.  The toad would swell up and burst, and you would then apply another, continuing until the patient got better*** or you ran out of toads.
*** Or, you know, died.

(To find out more about the delights of medieval medicine, join me at the back of The Wickit Chronicle books where I get to include much that is gruesome and revolting from the Middle Ages, just for the fun of it.) 

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

Piers Plowman and the Black Death by Ann Swinfen

I’ve recently been given the beautiful Folio Society edition of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which has set me thinking again about the poem and its context. 

I’ve been intrigued by Piers Plowman – rather oddly – since an early age. When I was nine, I attended a P.N.E.U. school, where the history books we used were the Piers Plowman series, which featured the same image on the front cover as does the Folio edition.

At that age I was just developing my passion for history, reading historical novels, visiting Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and for the first time experiencing that shiver along the spine that comes when we feel suddenly directly in touch with the past.

It was a very good school history series, although there was not a great deal about Piers Plowman in those particular volumes, apart from a few quotations, as the period we were studying covered the Neolithic through to the Romans, but my fiction reading at the time took me into the mediaeval period. Proper study of Piers Plowman only came later, in student days and, ultimately, in lecturing on the poem to university students.

An aspect of the work which I sometimes feel is not emphasised enough is the context of the contemporary English society in which it was written – the horrific aftermath of the Black Death, or the Great Pestilence, as it was known at the time. Piers Plowman is a fascinating work, as much for the vivid picture it presents of fourteenth-century English life as for its passionate – and often angry – moral message.

Written by William Langland soon after half the population of England had been wiped out by the Black Death in around seven months, the narrative poem takes a long hard look at what is wrong with society. It is in the form of an allegorical dream vision, set initially in the Malvern Hills. The dream vision was a literary genre quite common at the time (Chaucer, amongst others, also used it), and although this structure is no longer familiar, the social satire and the quest for a decent life are literary genres familiar to everyone since the Greek and Roman period down to the present day. One of the joys of Piers Plowman is its robust and detailed portrayal of contemporary life, and some of its unexpected twists. One of my favourites is the wicked Rose the Regrater. Rose is a retailer, that is, she buys wholesale, then resells at a profit. In the fourteenth century this was considered a crime and a sin. Heavens! What would happen to the world economy now if we still held the same view?

Shipton-under-Wychwood Church

William Langland is believed to have come from Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, a village I knew well in my student days. Don’t you love that village name? I believe ‘ton’ derives from ‘toun’, a large working farmstead, so Shipton was probably a large sheep-rearing farm or cluster of farms at the edge of Wychwood. And I think we can guess the derivation of the latter!

At the time William was writing, those who had survived the Black Death of 1348-9,  were having to come to terms with a violently changed world. He was probably a child or very young man at the time of the pandemic and would have had vivid memories of it. The population was now thin on the ground. Whole villages were inhabited by nothing but ghosts. Towns were full of empty, decaying houses. Plague pits, where the dead had been tumbled hastily into mass graves, still scarred the outskirts of every town and village. Suddenly there was no longer the peasant labour force to cultivate the fields, so that much of the agricultural land must have reverted to a wasteland of scrub, thistles and bracken. Flocks of sheep must have become feral. Landowners could no longer depend on their bonded labourers to work their lands and tend their flocks and herds, nor on their tenants (now mostly dead) to pay their rents. Moreover, the plague returned three more times before the end of the century, killing even more of the population. In 1361-2 alone, another ten percent of the population died.

Those labourers who survived discovered that they could demand higher wages. They could leave their masters and seek better conditions elsewhere, or move to a town and take up life as a free craftsman. It led to a huge social upheaval and an unprecedented movement of population.

Above all, those who had experienced the plague must have thought the end of the world had come. The afflicted often died alone and unshriven. Social order broke down. With family, friends and neighbours dying all around them, it would have seemed to a devout fourteenth-century population that God was determined to destroy mankind. There was no cure for the plague. It struck at random – wicked and worthy alike. Imagine how terrifying it must have been.

So it’s not surprising that a work like Piers Plowman should have been written a couple of decades after the first visitation of the plague, examining what was wrong with society. (Why, after all, had God chosen to inflict this terrible punishment?) And searching for a path to a good Christian life. (So the punishment would not return to destroy the survivors.)

The pope and the Church he headed had also begun to fall into disrepute from the time of the removal of the papal court to Avignon in 1309. Now some began to question whether God’s displeasure lay with corruption in the Church. The papal schism of 1378 damaged the reputation of the Church even further.

Although the narrative standpoint in Piers Plowman is nominally mediaeval Catholicism, there are the seeds here of the new, questioning movements which would lead eventually to Protestantism. John Ball, one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, appropriated the name ‘Piers Plowman’ in his writings. Piers, of course, represents the ‘common man’, Everyman, one of those peasants whose status in society was profoundly changed by the devastation of the Black Death. 

John Ball encouraging the peasants

The first plague years in England were 1348-9, the following outbreaks occurring in 1361-2, 1369, and 1374-5. Piers Plowman was written somewhere around 1370 or a little later. The year 1378 saw the papal schism. The Peasants’ Revolt took place in 1381. 

Richard II meeting the peasants

The Lollard movement for the reform of the Church originated in the middle of the same century, in the same circumstances of plague, and its most famous leader, the theologian John Wycliffe, was driven out of Oxford for his ‘heretical’ views in 1381. His translation of the Bible into the vernacular (1382) circulated amongst reformers until the Reformation, despite being banned, and it influenced the Authorised Version produced in the reign of James I, as well as the later translation by Tyndale. The whole second half of the fourteenth century was a crucible of radically new ideas that would have been unthinkable just fifty years before.

John Wycliffe

So, although there is certainly no evidence that William Langland was a Lollard, his writings reflect the major upheavals in social and religious thinking of the late fourteenth century. Although we tend to associate the beginning of the modern world with the coming of the Tudors, its earliest roots lie in the extraordinary events and new ideas which arose during the late fourteenth century, more than a hundred years earlier. They are articulated above all in Piers Plowman, a new kind of literary voice for a new era.

'Punishing the gods' by Karen Maitland

Revering gods in a Chinese Joss House

I have just been reading the wonderful novel ‘The Good Earth’ by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. Pearl Buck also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. The novel concerns a peasant family's struggle for survival in a China before World War I. It is so moving it is said that the novel influenced Americans to regard the Chinese people as allies in the coming war with Japan, because it engender such compassion among readers for the characters and their heart-wrenching story.

One of the passages that really struck me was near the beginning of the novel, when Wang Lung, the farmer and the whole village is starving during a widespread famine. Pearl Buck writes –

Malaysian Chinese gods

Once he (Wang Lung) walked, dragging one foot after another in his famished weakness, to the temple of the earth, and deliberate spat in the face of the small, imperturbable god who sat there with his goddess. There were no sticks of incense now before this pair, nor had there been for many moons, and their paper clothes were tattered and showed their clay bodies through the rents.

This passage reminded me vividly of the way the statues of saints were treated in Medieval Christian Churches. Normally the statues were treated with great reverence. They were clothed in fabric capes, ornamented with crowns or jewels. Candles and incense were burned before them and they were honoured in colourful processions, as they often are in Europe today, by being carried shoulder high through the streets to bless the people, town, fields and boats.

But during the Black Death of 1348, and the floods and famine of that year which killed more people than the plague itself in England, there are many recorded incidents of the statues of the saints being punished by the Christian population for their failure to protect them. It was not simply that people could not afford to buy candles or incense to burn or that people, desperate for money, stripped the saints’ images of valuables. 

Many statues of the saints, were deliberately stripped of their cloaks and garlands, taken out of the church, whipped, beaten and ceremonially drowned, for their perceived failure to save the people. The faithful parishioners dragged the statues out of the churches themselves and punished them in an act of revenge, venting their fury on them, in much the same way we see people doing now to statues of political leaders when the regime is overthrown.

Maybe this shows us that human psychology never changes. We can never accept that something is a natural disaster or an accident. We always seem to need to find someone to hold responsible, someone to blame, even for events like flooding or famine.

Curiously, once the first wave of the Great Pestilence was over people went back to revering the same images of the saints just as they always had, either retrieving the exiled saint from the muddy ditches and ponds where they'd cast them and restoring them to the churches and shrines, or if the statue was too badly damaged commissioning new one of the same saint. Their allegiance had not changed.