Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [356]
The bubonic plague is usually carried from host to host by fleas. No less than seventy-two possible host animals have been identified, from rabbits, hares and squirrels, dogs and cats, to – the best known – rats. The different forms of infected animal population are then grouped into two, so that we speak of two varieties of the disease: the sylvatic form to be found amongst non-domestic rodents like squirrels, less likely to have intimate contact with humans – this is the form found in the United States today – and the murine form, usually transmitted through rats, and therefore likely to reach the human population.
With the pneumonic plague, the same bacteria are transmitted from one infected human to another, by tiny droplets in the breath.
The Black Death travelled round Europe in a huge clockwise curve, from Italy round the west and ending in Scandinavia and the Baltic.
That it struck so particularly virulently and spread so completely may have been due to several causes. The population of Europe in the previous century had greatly increased, to a level it was not to reach again until the eighteenth century. A series of bad harvests may have created famines during the first half of the fourteenth century and lowered the resistance of some of the population. It is also thought that the rat population, especially the black household rat, had increased substantially in the thirteenth century – indeed there may have been few if any rats on the island of Britain before that time. All these circumstances, however, are only suggestions – proof is lacking. Indeed, only one definitive statement about the circumstances favouring the reception of the plague emerges from history. It came from the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris, in the year 1348.
In the year of Our Lord 1345, on March 20, there was a conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the House of Aquarius.
The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter portends death and disaster.
The conjunction of Mars and Jupiter portends pestilence in the air.
For Jupiter is warm and humid and draws up evil vapours from earth and water; and Mars is hot and dry, and kindles the evil into an infective fire.
We must therefore expect a terrible calamity.
In the first months of 1348 the plague struck Venice and Pisa. By March it had reached the crowded city of Florence where the people, labelled thirty years earlier by their exiled poet Dante as wolves, died more like flies. Southern France was already in its grip. By June it had reached west to central Spain and taken in almost all France to north of Paris. Some time afterwards it reached the shores of England.
When the flea bit Peter Wilson, and the bacteria entered his blood, they travelled with him up the river Avon. Though they had travelled over seven thousand miles, they were still teeming with fury.
Walter Wilson and his youngest son Peter arrived back at Sarum that night, and went straight to the Shockley farm.
It was several years since Mary Shockley had died and the farm had passed to her nephew William, who spent most of his time in the city. Of the five children of John Wilson, only Walter remained on the farm; though he had been well treated, both he and his family continued to hate the Shockleys because they were their masters.
Peter Wilson was glad to get home. Neither he nor his family thought about the plague during the next forty-eight hours.
Nobody at Sarum did.
The one exception was Gilbert de Godefroi.
The strange behaviour of Gilbert de Godefroi, which for several days made people say that the knight had turned eccentric, was caused by a letter he received on the day of Peter Wilson’s return. It came from a cloth merchant, newly arrived in London from the continent.
Before this, Godefroi had heard vague rumours of a plague in the south of France; but he had given them no particular thought. The letter was more explicit:
This terrible plague is raging in Paris already.