Funeral pyres, decomposing corpses, conspiracy theories, xenophobia: the similarities between the plagues of medieval Europe and Britain’s current foot and mouth epidemic are marked, writes John Vidal Each day, many thousands died. The land was empty, the villages were silent. Fires smouldered for weeks, the acrid palls of smoke drifting over the hills and valleys. The authorities could not keep up with the burials and the corpses were left to decompose on the wayside, in shelters and in open fields. Those animals that had not succumbed to the disease roamed free, and the fields went uncultivated. Some families blockaded themselves in houses, others fled. Communities were barred to outsiders. Neighbour feared neighbour, travellers and visitors were turned away; xenophobia became rife and people were isolated and left to fend for themselves. As the disease came inexorably closer to communities, so the sense of fearfulness and impending calamity increased. Wild rumours, conspiracy theories and myths abounded. People appealed to the highest moral, medical and secular authorities, who all maintained they were in control of the situation, but in fact had little idea how to respond. The trust between the government and the people was eroded. Once the pestilence arrived, ignorance only added to the horror. People succumbed to fatalism, passivity and despair. The sense grew that no one could escape. The agrarian economy was temporarily shattered, but out of the calamitous times it was widely hoped that profound change, economic betterment and a fuller understanding of the causes of the disaster would come. For many, though, it was, literally and metaphorically, “the world upside down”. Britain in the mid-14th century plague years? Or real life and sensibility today in some of the traumatised rural communities of Cumbria, southern Scotland, Devon, Shropshire and Derbyshire? This description of a time of pestilence in Britain is, in fact, a composite culled from conversations between journalists, and farmers and rural dwellers in the past weeks, as well as from the chronicles of the middle ages.
On the level of broad national calamity, there is, of course, no comparison between the two ages or the pestilences themselves. The Black Death of 1428-30, spread by fleas and carried mostly by rats, killed up to a third of all Europeans. The foot and mouth epidemic now raging across half of Britain and slowly moving into mainland Europe is, in contrast, only affecting animals, most of which would normally be killed anyway. Where the plagues shook to their foundations a whole continent’s social, moral, economic and institutional edifices, foot and mouth will marginally and temporarily cause deterioration of a single country’s economy, lose a few thousand farmers their livelihood, and prematurely end the lives of half a million or more beasts.
But plague historians in Europe, the United States and Britain note that the responses to the two epidemics are strangely similar, with many parallels between these two distraught times. They suggest that when under siege from a real or perceived phantom enemy, society responds very much as it always has done, and that beneath all the progress and obvious advancements in medical knowledge of the past centuries not much changes in the human or political condition. “Certain ways of behaviour and certain reactions against fate throw mutual light upon each other,” said the French medievalist Edouard Perroy. He was echoed in 1978 by the American historian Barbara Tuchman, who sought to link medieval and modern times. “The interval of 600 years permits what is significant in human character to stand out,” she wrote. The Swiss historian JCLS de Sismondi went further: “There is a fellow feeling between both [ages]. They were bad for humanity. The rules were breaking down under the presence of adverse and violent events. We recognise with a painful twinge the marks of a period of anguish when there is no sense of an assured future.” Tuchman acknowledged that the people of the Middle Ages existed under mental, moral and physical circumstances so different from our own as to constitute almost a foreign civilisation, but she argued that “as a result, the qualities of conduct that we recognise as familiar amid these alien surroundings are revealed as permanent in human nature”. Voltaire put it more succinctly; “History never repeats itself but man always does.” So let’s look at the points of contact between the ages. The background to both disasters was superficially similar. At the start of the 14th century, there were, says Mark Ormrod, professor of medieval history at York University, a series of natural and man-made disasters, including famine, wars and massive floods that drowned many communities, especially in Kent and south- east Britain. It rings a bell today with global warming being blamed for much of the recent flooding. “The climate was changing,” says Ormrod. “They were entering a mini ice age. Much of Britain’s farmland was said to be exhausted by over-cultivation.” The argument is that Britain was overpopulated. It had reached a point where it could no longer grow. Marginal land had been put under cultivation, but farmers didn’t allow the land to lie fallow and yields dropped. Just as modern Britain has been plagued by mad cow disease, salmonella and swine fever, medieval writers reported widespread murrains, or cattle diseases. Both societies, too, knew greater strife. We have the global traumas of Aids, environmental threats and a growing world population; they had the local traumas of almost constant war and disease. Both were experiencing great change, institutional corruption and massive injustice. Today, everyone from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to the United Nations reports widening gaps between rich and poor. In the 14th century, it was left to anonymous scribes to tell the same story. “The valuable wool exports had halved between 1310 and 1345 and landowners were said to be in difficulty,” says Ormrod. Wealth was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Then, as now, he says, the cities were burgeoning as people came in to escape problems on the land. “Regional trade was expanding and it was seen as a time of great opportunity as well as one of shanty towns and destitution.”
The arrival of the two diseases struck similar chords. In both cases there had been a significant period without major human or animal plagues. The last widespread human pestilence, in the 8th century, had been long forgotten just as our own age believed major foot and mouth outbreaks would never reappear; the last one in Britain was more than 30 years ago. Britain should have seen foot and mouth coming, just as medieval England could have foreseen the plague. For several years in the 14th century Europeans had been hearing of a mysterious and terrible pestilence approaching from the East, via China, India and Syria. It arrived in an unprepared Genoa. There was no understanding of it but no astonishment either when, having ravaged much of Europe, it finally landed in Britain from a ship at Melcombe Regis near Weymouth in Dorset in 1348. Today we see, with hindsight, that burgeoning world trade, ease of movement and dubious farming techniques had made a perfect incubator for foot and mouth disease to arrive and spread rapidly in Britain. Did the government not understand that there had been outbreaks in more than 60 countries in the previous two years and that it was inevitable that foot and mouth would come?
Equally, the medieval church, crown and civil service must have had time enough to prepare the people for the pestilence that was spreading fast down the world’s trade routes. If the one age had a limited understanding of its own vulnerability, the other had but a limited knowledge of epidemiology. Both ages, it may be said, were wilfully blind. In the event, the diseases came with shocking rapidity and terrible fierceness. In neither case did the authorities have a clue how many animals or people would die. Nor did either society know precisely how the plagues spread or how they could be controlled. Just as one farm can get foot and mouth and its neighbour be spared, so there were great variations in the Black Death’s toll. One village could escape for months, but it might sweep though the next in a matter of days. Few medieval families did not lose at least one member. “But the culture of death was very important,” says Ormrod. “It was more resilient to these shocks than modern society.” When death came, the authorities of both ages reacted with relative complacency. Medieval Britain was effectively ruled by a clerical and royal elite with the church, in Tuchman’s words, “the all-powerful matrix and law of life, omnipresent and all but compulsory”. It offered people salvation and a cure for all ills. When the plague came, Christianity’s first instinct was to do as it had always done in times of trouble: offer absolution, tell people to confess and pray harder, spray holy water around, blame their sinful ways, lock themselves up and isolate communities. The effect was to confirm the power of the establishment. Today, the only community of people in Britain effectively governed in the same way by a centralised power, and dependent utterly on a central authority for their survival, are the farmers.
The European Union and the common agricultural policy, with the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food a minor satellite dispensing what Europe broadly dictates, is as powerful as the medieval church. Its philosophy of rewarding production above all is as dogmatic as any religion. Its grip on the rural community is complete because farmers depend on the ministry for advice and subsidies. No farmer can ignore the ministry and none may question its authority in times of trouble. When it came to foot and mouth, the ministry, just like the medieval church, reached for what it knew. Sidelining the advancements in science and epidemiology, it instituted draconian laws, dusted off a 90-year-old mass slaughter policy designed to protect trade, advised people to stay away from the countryside, reached for its railway sleepers and quicklime, lit the fires and argued from day one that it would kill first and ask questions later. Like a medieval pope, its will alone would be done. The ministry is today like king, priest and politician rolled into one. Just as Rome centralised so much medieval power, oversaw all finance, and set itself up alone to grant the afterlife and ease the woes of the present, so the ministry in the foot and mouth crisis has the absolute power of life and death over animals. It allows no appeals and keeps its epidemiological results secret. It alone holds the cure to the present pestilence the stocks of vaccinations that it refuses to use. No farmer or vet may treat foot and mouth, just as no medieval commoner was let into the secrets of the church.
Just as the grasping and inefficient medieval church with its armies of ignorant clergy offered its supplicants absolution from sins in the temporal world and heaven in the hereafter, so the ministry today offers the promise of protection from the free market and the vaguer hope of future economic betterment. Just like the medieval church insisting on church attendance and admission of sins, however, the ministry attaches conditions farmers must toe the line and raise their livestock in its approved ways. That other countries increasingly see Britain’s farming as barbaric is immaterial. In the 14th century dispensations, indulgences, benefices and pardons were all available from the church at a price. Today the subsidies the modern reward system go mostly to the rich farmers who have paid heavily for the intensification of their enterprises. The poor and small are marginalised and left to beg. Those such as organic or sustainable farmers whose views differ from the ministry’s are treated like heretics of the new church of industrial farming. Come the pestilences, both ages resorted to age-old “cures”. Where the medieval church offered holy water to the serfs and peasantry, the ministry proposes that farmers buy disinfectant as a protection from foot and mouth. In the 14th century there were not enough priests to hear confessions and commoners were hurriedly allowed to pardon and absolve each other. The ministry is appealing round the world for more vets and students to kill the animals and check for disease. According to Abigail Woods, a vet and historian of foot and mouth, vets are “a latter-day professional clergy”. The first vets, she says, were referred to as “the priests of nature”. The echoes reverberate down the ages. Black Death is thought to have struck particularly at children. Foot and mouth has afflicted mostly young animals. Just as towns were ordered to ring their church bells to drive the 14th-century plague away, so the church bells of Britain are, by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be tolled every Sunday in recognition of the crisis. When Britain’s chief vet, Jim Scudamore, the high priest of veterinary science, went into the heartland of the disease in Cumbria, he was jeered by the farmers, just as the priests of Europe were turned upon by mobs of roaming flagellants and anti-clericals as the plague took its toll. The flagellants were unique to mainland Europe and, according to Norman Cohn, author of The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, they saw themselves as redeemers. In groups of 200 or more they marched from city to city, stripped to the waist, scourging themselves with whips. They became a revolutionary force; they persecuted the Jews, accusing them of poisoning wells and therefore causing the plague. “There were no Jews in Britain because they had all been expelled in the previous century,” says Ormrod. “But there was a lot of xenophobia against foreigners. I can’t help but think that if there had been Jews here, they would have been persecuted.”
As in the 14th century, the traditional enemies of the state, together with the weakest and the most powerful in the land, have been seen as the authors of misfortune. The supermarkets have been widely blamed in the media and there have been rumours that refugees brought in the virus while fleeing the world’s poorest countries. Meanwhile, animal welfare groups have been investigated for allegedly spreading the disease because they were so appalled by the conditions of modern farming. In the plague years, the devil was blamed. Today, according to other rumours, Saddam Hussein is accused of practising biological warfare. When the first plague was over there were six more in the next 60 years the world had changed. In the words of one French chronicler: “Blank spaces opened on all sides in human society, stunned and for a time destroyed the life and faith of the world.” Above all, the population had declined by 40% and took centuries to fully recover. In Britain, as elsewhere, peasants took the opportunity to increase their land holdings. Times were better economically for the survivors. The church emerged from the epidemic years richer, but far more unpopular. Personal attacks on the clergy increased. British medieval historians have researched the decline of the role of the church and the rise of the laity. Within 30 years of the plague, the peasant’s revolt against the poll tax, foreshadowing the modern revolt against Margaret Thatcher’s version of the tax, had further rocked the English ship of state. “The end of an age of submission came in sight,” says Tuchman. “To that extent, the Black Death may have been the unrecognised beginnings of modern society.” Will Europe and Britain be transformed after foot and mouth? As in medieval times, there are loud cries for change and a certain optimism. Politicians and farmers, the media and the voluble agrarian reform groups across the continent already see this as a watershed time, an opportunity to rethink agriculture and the relationship between town and country and all the different players. They may be pushing at an open door, or it is equally possible that it will take more disaster, as in the 14th century, to see real change. In John Dryden’s words: “For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered.”