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The Black Death is the name commonly given nowadays to the horrific bubonic and pneumonic plagues that sorely afflicted
Europe from the middle of the 14th century to the end of the 17th century. On the whole, plague has been confined to central Asia, but three times in the 6th, 14th and 19th centuries it has burst out to ravage the rest
of the world. The 14th-century outbreak started in the 1330s, reached Mediterranean Europe in 1347 and hit England in 1348. The Scots called it 'the foul death of England', and smugly declared it was God's judgment on
the English - but then Scotland in turn was devastated in 1349-50. According to John Fordun, writing in the 1380s, the country suffered 'so great a pestilence and plague among men as had ever been heard of'. The bubonic
plague is transmitted by infected fleas on rodents, particularly rats. The rats in question were transported along trade routes, especially in loads of grain. When humans picked up fleas from the rats, they caught the
disease. Infection, in Fordun's words, 'led to a strange and unwonted kind of death, in so much as the flesh of the sick was somehow puffed out and swollen, and they dragged out their earthly life for barely two days'.
Without modern medicine there was about a 70 per cent likelihood of death. Pneumonic plague was even more deadly - with a 99.9 per cent death rate. This developed when plague germs combined with those causing
respiratory illnesses, and was directly infectious in humans: as the nursery rhyme puts it, 'Atishoo, atishoo, all fall down' - dead. Historians estimate that in most of Europe the initial Black Death
killed between a quarter and a third of the population. Then, having subsided, the plague returned after about 10 years and continued to return at fairly frequent intervals. The cumulative effect was a population fall
of over 50 per cent by the early 15th century. In Scotland, the plague followed the general pattern. But how badly the country suffered is not known; the only statistic about deaths is that given by the 15th-century
chronicler, Bower. According to him, 24 canons of St Andrews cathedral - probably about two-thirds of the total - perished in 1349. Fordun states, more generally, that one in three people died at that time. But if
Fordun was like the other chroniclers who exaggerated the, death rate, then in fact Scotland may have escaped relatively lightly. There is circumstantial evidence to support this conclusion, and, in general, the rat
fleas that spread bubonic plague really needed warmer climates than Scotland's to thrive. Cold weather does produce the pneumonic plague, but that is so lethal and rapid that its victims tend to die before infecting
many others. Plague, in Scotland then, perhaps took the form of limited summer outbreaks of bubonic, and localised winter cases of pneumonic. But even if Scotland was hit only half as badly as England, the
initial attack would have killed one in six - which would be almost 200,000 out of a total of probably around a million - and later attacks would have made things worse. Quite simply, plague was by far the worst
disaster suffered by the people of Scotland (and Europe) in recorded history. Its trauma was strikingly described by Fordun: 'Men shrank from it so much that, through fear of contagion, sons, fleeing as from the face of
leprosy or from an adder, dared not go and see their parents in the throes of death.' Inevitably it was seen as God's punishment, hitting everyone, holy as well as sinners. 'The Dance of Death' - carved at Roslin Chapel
in the 1450s - in which rich and poor, priests and laymen are struck indiscriminately, became a common motif. Death from plague was so sudden and loathsome that people feared they might not receive the last rites, and
so would be damned. That greatest fear of all is movingly evoked in Ane Prayer for the Pest (plague), written in the later 15th century by Robert Henryson. Rather than 'That we should thus be hastely put down, And die
as beasts without confession', Henryson begged God to 'pacify Thy feud', and, if He had to punish mankind with death, Use dearth, O Lord, or sickness and hunger sore, And slake Thy plague that is so
penetrative. It is hardly surprising that late medieval religion is characterised by awe of an enigmatic God and fear of eternal hell. In material terms, however, the plague's effect on the surviving people
was very different. In the early 14th century, Scotland, like the rest of Europe, had come under increasing population pressure. After 1350 that changed completely. With a much smaller population there was more land and
food to go round: consequently, rents and food prices fell, but wages went up because there was a labour shortage. This was hard for the landlords, but greatly improved the ordinary peoples circumstances. The norm for a
peasant holding seems to have more than doubled, from about 10 to 20 acres in the late 13th century to more than 50 acres acres in the 1370s. In Robert III's reign (1390 - 1406), bower recalled, 'there was an
abundance of provisions in the kingdom'. Life was still, of course, tar from easy for the people of Scotland, but it was probably significantly easier than it had been a century earlier. Finally, the plague may have hit
the north of Scotland less severely than the south, and so population pressure may not have slackened so much in the Highlands. That may explain why, in the later 14th century, the advancement of the
English language upon the Highlands ceased, and the English Gaelic boundary became fixed for centuries at roughly the Highland line. Moreover, from the mid 14th century Highland lawlessness, and particularly the
activities of the lords of the Isles, caused serious trouble for Scots kings. On the whole, there seems to have been considerable Highland pressure in the post-plague era on the rest of the country; can that perhaps be
linked to a change in the population balance? If so, Scotland's 'Highland problem' may well have been, in part, the most lasting legacy of the Black Death. |
