The Black Death killed somewhere between one- and two-thirds of medieval Europe’s population, and unsurprisingly the art and writing of the time, along with the historians who followed, focused heavily on death. Who wouldn’t? But what’s to be said about the people who survived? 

It’s true that survivors got a mention or six. A medieval chronicler, Geoffrey le Baker, a clerk in Oxfordshire, wrote: 

“People who one day had been full of happiness, on the next were found dead. Some were tormented by boils which broke out suddenly in various parts of the body, and were so hard and dry that when they were lanced hardly any liquid flowed out. Many of these people escaped, by lancing the boils or by long suffering. Other victims had little black pustules scattered over the skin of the whole body. Of these people very few, indeed hardly any, recovered life and health.”

“Many” is a vague number, though, and we’re too late to ask ol’ Geoff for more detail. That’s one reason historians like records. If you understand the context, they can tell you something solid. 

I’ll come back to that business about context.

A street in London during the plague. Notice the death cart in the background. Am I always this much fun to be around? Yeah, probably. Credit: Wellcome Library, curtesy of Wikimedia.

In the meantime, records: historians like them, and medieval deaths triggered legalities, and legalities triggered records. If a person died owning property, it had to be transferred, and that left a record. And although a peasant wouldn’t have owned the land he farmed (we are generally talking about a he here, and I’ll come back to that too), he had a formal right to farm it and when he died his family had to pay the lord a heriot–usually their best animal–to transfer that right to one of them. All that would show up in the manor records. 

A person getting sick did none of that. And a person not getting sick? Ditto.

Recently, though, a group of historians were lucky enough to find a scrap of parchment in the accounts of a manor–Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire, whose monks had recorded the length of time that 22 peasants were off sick from the end of April to the start of August 1349. In a normal year, you’d be likely to find two or three absences, but the plague was burning its way across the country and this was ten times the average, so the odds are good that these peasants weren’t out sick with an attack of the whimsies.

The absences that Ramsey Abbey’s monks tracked ranged from the fleeting to the chronic. Sickness went up during the harvest (exhaustion, the historians speculate, or accidents caused by exhaustion). They also tracked how much it cost to hire a replacement for someone who was out sick (14 shillings for a ploughman to replace a Sussex tenant who was off for 84 days). 

What, a medieval peasant had the right to take off work?

What the monks were tracking didn’t include the time peasants were too sick to work on the land they worked for themselves. It was the days of work they owed the lord–in this case, the abbey–in exchange for the land that the lord, out of the goodness of his heart and pocketbook, let them work. And the more land they had the right to work, the more days they owed.

How much time the peasant owed the lord had been negotiated at some point, along with their rights to the common land and how much time they could take off if they were sick. 

Translation? Sick leave varied from manor to manor. On the low end, with zero days, was Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire, where the rule was that if the tenant “is ill nevertheless, he will do the labour services he owes.” On the other end, at Ramsey Abbey, peasants had a right to a year and a day–and widows could take leave when their husbands died. 

That does sound vaguely like a fairy tale: he lay ill for a year and a day and then returned to plow his lord’s field, although his strength had not returned.

On all manors, peasants could expect time off for religious festivals and feast days–and for some of the lunatic local festivals that enliven the weirder side of England’s history. (Take this one for example.)

The number of feast days would also have varied from region to region and from manor to manor. Trying to generalize about the middle ages is enough to chase a person from their own personal middle age deep into old age. It may explain how I got this old.

No one was supposed to work on religious festival days, and the church courts fined some for violating the rule, leaving us proof (in case we ever doubted it) that not everyone did as they were told. Some people were fined for working their own land and some for doing paid work on someone else’s. 

How would anyone know if a peasant worked when it was forbidden–or, for that matter if some different peasant was faking an illness? Manors were small, close-knit communities. Sure, a healthy person could lie in bed moaning and looking wan for a day or two, but if they were sick when they were supposed to work the lord’s land but were miraculously well enough to work their own, everyone would know. Ditto if they were working when they were supposed to be in church. Work was public. Land was and still is– Well, you know what land is like. It’s outdoors. People can see it, and see if someone’s out there working on it. 

As for taking time off from working both the lord’s land and their own, hunger would’ve gotten the final vote on that. People lived close to the edge.

So who survived the plague?

Let’s go back to Ramsey Abbey and that list of people who were out sick: a disproportionate number of survivors had larger holdings, adding weight to a theory among historians and archeologists (not a universal theory, but never mind) that the poor and elderly were more vulnerable than the stronger and better fed, who would’ve been more able to fight off secondary infections. 

The list also includes more men than women–19 out of the 22. It’s a meaningful number, but here’s where we come back to what I said earlier about context: the number doesn’t mean more men survived than women. The land tenure system selected for sex; the plague didn’t. A holding might go to a woman if no man in a family had survived, but men were the first choice. Women worked, and they existed, but they left only the slightest mark on medieval records. Legally speaking, a married woman disappeared behind her husband and his name is the one on the records.

The world after the plague

What sort of world, then, did the survivors survive to live in? One account says, “There was so great a shortage of servants and labourers that there was no one who knew what needed to be done.” And between the shortage of labor and (wouldn’t  you just know it?) disastrous weather, the 1349 and 1350 harvests were the worst medieval England had known.