SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



tenants who died in the First Pestilence and were tenants at will and not 

 free tenants.' 1 The third is a much mutilated and in parts illegible list of 

 the free tenants who died.* 



A careful study of all available evidence seems to show that the pestilence 

 first broke out in South-east Durham. It raged with especial virulence in 

 Billingham. Forty-eight tenants of the prior were included among its victims. 

 In some cases husband and wife died together, in others the widow appears 

 to have escaped. Billingham was certainly a large vill, but it is impossible to 

 doubt that at least half the population was carried off, and the proportion may 

 have been greater. 



Twenty-eight tenants died at Wolviston, and fifteen at Newton Bewley. 

 Fugitives carried the infection to neighbouring vills. The bishop received 

 mortuaries on behalf of twenty dead tenants at Norton during the vacancy 

 in the living. 1 At Stockton only three-fourths of the usual number of autumn 

 works were rendered ' on account of the pestilence of death,' as the bailiff put 

 it.* We can see how the plague swept along the roads in the east of the 

 bishopric till it reached Shields and Newcastle and passed into Northumber- 

 land. Practically every vill belonging to the prior was attacked more or less 

 severely, and in the case of the two Heworths two-thirds' of the tenants 

 disappeared.' It was impossible for the bishop's vills to escape, and we know 

 that some of them, especially Easington 7 and Sunderland, 8 suffered rather 

 severely. During September the infection was carried into the western parts 

 of the bishopric. The bailiff of Coatham, near Darlington, tells how four 

 ploughmen belonging to the manor died just before Michaelmas,' and we 

 know, from various entries in the later Halmote Rolls, that the western vills 

 suffered rather severely before the plague was stayed. As though the horrors 

 of the plague were not enough, the Scots planned an irruption in the autumn, 

 and invented a new oath ere they plundered. But ' the foul death of the 

 English ' broke out among the raiders as they lay in Selkirk Forest, and Scot- 

 land paid a heavy fine for the invasion. 10 



In winter the plague died down, but it left behind it a ruined and dis- 

 pirited people. Every rank in life suffered freemen, clergy, 11 peasants. 

 Such of the serfs as escaped often left their native villages in panic. We 

 hear of a peasant driven stark mad with grief and wandering about the 

 country. 18 Sometimes the people deserted the old site of the village in a 

 body (as according to local tradition the men of Wallsend and Harton did) 

 and built the village elsewhere. * No tenants came from West Thickley 



1 Loc. 4, No. 141. 



' The present headings of these rolls are of later date than their contents. For the deaths in the 

 various rolls see App. I. 



' Bf. Hatfielfi Suiv. (Surtees Soc. raii), 143. Ibid. 142. 



1 MS. in Loc. 4, No. 147, gives the number as 21, but it is possible that the figures may only refer to 

 servile tenants. 



' Dur. Halmott R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxiii), 121 ; cf. MS. Prior's Halmote, Bk. ii, 190 d., where we are told 

 that the value of the mill had fallen from 5 3;. i,d. to 201. at Nether Heworth. 



' Dur. Curs. No. 1 2, fol. 1 3 d. Ibid. fol. 23 d. 



* Bf. Hatfitlft Sun. (Surtees Soc. mil), 247-8. 



10 See Knighton, Chnm. (Rolls Ser.), ii, 62-3. Rogers, in his Si* Centuries of Work and Wagei, i, 223, 

 curiously misinterprets the passage. 



11 It is unfortunate that Hatfield's Register is defective for the yean 1349, 1350, and 1 351, but it is signifi- 

 cant that it ends abruptly with an incomplete entry of an ordination at Chester le Street in Sept. 1 349, at 

 which time the plague was certainly raging in the bishopric. 



"Dur. Curs. No. 12, fol. 58. 



211 



