June – August 1348
Melcombe and the West Country, June – August 1348
The plague comes to England by sea. A Franciscan friar at King’s Lynn wrote that a little before the feast of St John the Baptist, 24 June 1348, two ships came into Melcombe in Dorset, one of them from Bristol. One of the sailors had brought the plague with him from Gascony, and the people of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected. Other chronicles give a later day, about 7 July, and some name Southampton or Bristol as the first port. Melcombe Regis is today part of the town of Weymouth.
Gascony, the land around Bordeaux, belongs to the king of England, and every year English ships sail there for its wine. The plague is in Bordeaux by June 1348, and a ship carries it across the Bay of Biscay in about a week.
On land it moves at the pace of people and carts, along the roads from the Dorset coast. On 17 August Ralph of Shrewsbury, the bishop of Bath and Wells, orders processions every Friday in the churches of his diocese, to pray that God will turn the plague away from Wells and its people. At about the same time the plague reaches Bristol, the second port of the kingdom. Henry Knighton, a canon at Leicester, later wrote that almost the whole town died there, as if struck by sudden death.
East of Dorset the plague moves along the road through Salisbury and Winchester towards London. On 24 October William Edendon, the bishop of Winchester, writes to his clergy that the plague has begun a cruel attack on the coasts of England, and orders prayers and processions. By the end of 1348 it has reached London and most of the south of England.
Women milking ewes in a sheep pen, in the Luttrell Psalter, made in Lincolnshire about 1325 to 1340Wikimedia Commons, British Library, public domain
Sources
- Chronicle of the Grey Friars of King’s Lynn, in Rosemary Horrox (ed.), The Black Death (1994).
- Henry Knighton, Chronicon (about 1390), in Rosemary Horrox (ed.), The Black Death (1994).
- Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (1969).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
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