Michael Wood on how pandemics shape society
I don’t normally like watching my own films, but the other day I caught up with an episode of Story of England, our series telling the tale of one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through history. As the story reached 1348, it became startlingly topical. Kibworth had the heaviest known losses from the Black Death of any English village, with two-thirds of its inhabitants dying. This set me musing about past pandemics. Do they change history? Do they change us? Or does life just go on?
Great pandemics, such as the Plague of Justinian in AD 541, were often preceded by extreme weather events and natural disasters – history warns us about the interrelationship between climate and plague. In Europe, the Black Death was preceded by a Little Ice Age, as well as the Great Famine of 1314–18, which killed around 10 per cent of England’s population. When the Black Death hit England, perhaps one half of the population died.
The village of Kibworth Harcourt was owned at that point by Merton College Oxford, which still keeps court rolls from the period. They show tenants trying to keep things going ‘as normal’: filling vacant tenancies, appointing new village officers, and looking after orphaned children too young to take up their parents’ field strips.
Among the dead was the vicar, John Sibil. As is the case with care workers today, his was a dangerous job, requiring him to tend to the dying, give the last rites, and organise help and care for vulnerable survivors.
People in the 14th century didn’t understand the nature of transmission of the Yersinia pestis bacterium from rat fleas to humans. Yet the fact they thought it was passed from human to human meant they likely practised social distancing. In one household, the ex-reeve Roger Polle survived together with his wife and all three sons – but of his extended family elsewhere in the village, his two brothers and two first cousins all died. Three of the family’s four branches were gone before the century ended.
The psychological impact was shattering: today we’d call it PTSD. “It was as if the world were at an end,” said one. Medieval people found the loss of loved ones, friends and neighbours, the constraints on burial and mourning, as agonising as we do. But what is most interesting is how Kibworth responded to the Black Death.
In its aftermath, two local farmers put a house and some land in trust to pay for a village guild with a chaplain to distribute charity, say masses for the souls of the dead, and teach the young. The chaplain was a local man, and his duties were different from those provided by the parish vicar appointed by Merton. The local people were, in effect, paying for someone to try to alleviate the psychological trauma and the economic fallout of the epidemic. They worked with them to remember their dead and distribute food to those in need – and to do so at a local level as an act of charity.
Over time, similar grants were made by other villagers, and in the 15th century the land they had gifted provided an endowment for a free school “for the godly purpose of the good bringing up of one’s own, and other men’s children”. Astonishingly, the land still provides support for students from Kibworth today.
In the economy and society as a whole, the long-term effects of the pandemic became apparent over the next few decades. This was a time of great economic hardship and social unrest, and fairness and social justice became big issues. In Kibworth Harcourt, prolonged disputes over labour dues and repair and maintenance resulted in a new deal with Merton in 1439. From now, land was not to be held ‘in bondage’ but by negotiated contract paid in cash. The losses caused by the pandemic had undermined the labour-intensive feudal order, and accelerated the shift to a money economy – the local roots of capitalism.
The lessons of the Black Death in Kibworth, then, are that life went on, and that people rebuilt the economy on which they depended. But no one forgot there that everything rested on communal cooperation, kindness and solidarity. It was no accident that in the aftermath, in nearby Lutterworth, John Wycliffe composed his vernacular version of the New Testament, including one of the most enduring passages in the English language: “Now dwellen feith, hope, and charite, these thre; but the most of these is charite.”