The Black Death and recurring plague during the late Middle Ages in the County of Hainaut Joris Roosen BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 1 21/09/2020 15:45:13 Colofon The Black Death and recurring plague during the late Middle Ages in the County of Hainaut: Differential impact and diverging recovery ISBN: 978-94-6416-146-5 Copyright © 2020 Joris Roosen All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any way or by any means without the prior permission of the author, or when applicable, of the publishers of the scientific papers. Layout: Vera van Ommeren, persoonlijkproefschrift.nl Printing: Ridderprint | www.ridderprint.nl Dit proefschrift werd mogelijk gemaakt met financiële steun van de European Research Council (binnen het project “COORDINATINGforLIFE, beursnummer 339647, binnen het kader van het financieringsprogramma FP7-IDEAS-ERC) BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 2 21/09/2020 15:45:13 The Black Death and recurring plague during the late Middle Ages in the County of Hainaut Differential impact and diverging recovery De Zwarte Dood en terugkerende pestgolven tijdens de late middeleeuwen in het Graafschap Henegouwen Differentiële impact en uiteenlopend herstel (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. H.R.B.M. Kummeling, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 23 oktober 2020 des middags te 4.15 uur door Joris Roosen geboren op 8 oktober 1987 te Genk, België BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 3 21/09/2020 15:45:13 Promotor: Prof. dr. A.F. Heerma van Voss BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 4 21/09/2020 15:45:13 Contents General introduction 9 Data critique Chapter 1. Severity and selectivity of the Black Death and recurring plague in the 27 Southern Netherlands, 1349-1450 Introduction 29 Black Death mortality 30 The mortmain database 35 Selective mortality effects 40 Conclusion 44 Chapter 2. Dangers of noncritical use of historical plague data 47 Introduction 49 Noncritical use of historical plague databases 50 Biraben data set 54 Moving forward 58 Epidemiological characteristics of plague Chapter 3. The ‘light touch’ of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: an 61 urban trick? Introduction 63 Scarce source material 65 Indicators of plague mortality 67 Territorial pervasiveness 76 An urban bias 80 Conclusion 82 Chapter 4. The sex-selective impact of the Black Death and recurring plagues in the 85 Southern Netherlands, 1349-1450 Introduction 87 Material and methods 89 Employment of the mortmain database 89 Identifying plagues 92 Results 97 Discussion 104 Conclusion 105 BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 5 21/09/2020 15:45:13 Differential impact, diverging recovery Chapter 5. The Black Death: window of opportunity or disaster? Demographic 107 growth, stagnation and decline in the County of Hainaut, 1349-1541 Introduction 109 Endogenous factors 111 Delineating Hainaut regions 114 Exogenous plague mortality 119 Rural population developments 123 Concluding remarks 130 General conclusion 133 Appendices 139 Appendix to introduction: database description 140 Appendix to chapter 1 146 Appendix to chapter 3: plague mentions in the Low Countries sources, 1349-1499 151 Nederlandse wetenschappelijke samenvatting 179 Acknowledgements 185 Bibliography 187 BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 6 21/09/2020 15:45:13 BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 7 21/09/2020 15:45:13 BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 8 21/09/2020 15:45:13 General introduction That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 9 21/09/2020 15:45:13 General introduction Few historical relationships have been as intimate, enduring or disruptive as that between humans and infectious disease.1 Diseases have influenced the course of human history from the earliest times and severe epidemics in particular have been credited by historians for shaping long-term economic, cultural and demographic societal trajectories.2 No single epidemic stands out more in this regard than the mid-fourteenth century Black Death.3 Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the pathogen commonly known as plague,4 the Black Death is regarded as one of the greatest mortality crises ever to have struck humankind.5 Seen by many as a pivotal moment in European history, it has grabbed the attention of generations of historians.6 However, the Black Death itself was only the proverbial tip of the spear, the first outbreak of the ‘Second Plague Pandemic’ which established itself as a recurring presence for over five centuries across Eurasia and Africa. Only during the second half of the seventeenth century did plague start to retreat from Western Europe, while in Eastern Europe and Russia the disease remained until the late eighteenth century. Many final outbreaks occurred in port towns of the Middle East and the Mediterranean during the early nineteenth century.7 It is the repeat occurrence of the disease over many centuries that allows historians to investigate the root causes of vulnerability and resilience of past societies confronted with plague, by reconstructing its long-term socio-economic and demographic outcomes.8 Although early scholarship described the whole of post-Black Death Europe as a place fraught with economic depression,9 societal collapse and violence,10 current literature no longer accepts any direct association of plague with long-term socio-economic decay and instead focuses more explicitly on regional and chronological divergences.11 Within the context of the Great Divergence debate, for example, the impact of the Black Death could have either positive or negative long- term economic consequences.12 For western Europe, the demographic shock is said to have prompted -amongst other things- a process of institutional ‘creative destruction’,13 the decline of lordly power, efficiency gains in agriculture,14 the rise of real wages and improvements in living standards,15 all of which contributed to the rise of the European economy. While for the Middle East, which suffered a similar impact of the Black Death,16 the mid-fourteenth century mortality 1 Wolfe, Dunavan, & Diamond, ‘Origins’. 2 Diamond, Guns, germs, and steel; McNeill, Plagues and peoples. Noted in: Devos & Janssens, ‘Reconsidering the burden’. 3 All the chapters of this dissertation follow the convention of referring only to the first plague outbreak of the Second Pandemic (1346-1353) as the “Black Death”. The plague outbreaks from that point onwards will be referred to as recurring/recurrent plagues. This is in line with recent publications e.g. Alfani and Murphy, ‘Plague’, p. 315. 4 Garcia-Vallejo & van Kooyk, ‘A new cellular target’. 5 Benedictow, ‘The Black Death’. 6 Bowsky, The Black Death. 7 Dols, ‘The Second Plague Pandemic’, p.162; Shahraki, Carniel and Mostafavi, ‘Plague in Iran’. 8 Curtis, Soens and van Bavel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’. 9 Lopez & Miskimin, ‘The Economic Depression’. 10 Cohn, ‘The Black Death: End of a Paradigm’. 11 Cohn, ‘After the Black Death’, p. 457; Epstein, ‘Cities, regions’; Emigh, The underdevelopment; Cohn, ‘Pandemics’; Brenner, ‘Agrarian class’, p. 39; Brenner, ‘The agrarian roots’. For an early publication see: Robbins, ‘A Comparison’. 12 Broadberry, ‘Accounting’; Pamuk, ‘Black Death’; van Bavel and van Zanden, ‘Jump‐start’; Voigtländer and Voth, ‘Three horsemen of riches’, pp. 774-811. 13 Epstein, Freedom and growth. 14 Herlihy, The Black Death. 15 Clark, A farewell to alms, pp. 99-102. See also: Campbell, ‘Nature as historical protagonist’. 16 Ayalon, Natural disasters, p. 31. 10 BinnenwerkJorisVersie2.indd 10 21/09/2020 15:45:13 General introduction crisis is said to have ushered in a period of long-term economic stagnation.17 Similarly, in the context of the Little Divergence debate, plague mortality is claimed to have caused a rise in real wages and increases in human capital formation, both of which contributed to the rise of the North Sea Area during the early modern period.18 In Eastern Europe, however, plague mortality led to the impoverishment of the peasantry by breathing life into the so-called ‘second serfdom’.19 And for Southern Europe, repeat plague outbreaks of the seventeenth century have been blamed for long-term economic decline.20 Some scholars have suggested that regions which suffered the highest mortality rates during the Black Death, also experienced the most favourable long-term economic developments.21 However, according to Campbell, what mattered for defining the long- term positive or negative economic outcomes of the Black Death, was not the severity of the biological shock but the “socio-ecological context within which the mortality crisis occurred”.22 This dissertation explores a similar premise for the long-term demographic consequences of late medieval plague in the Southern Low Countries, and more specifically the County of Hainaut.23 Despite a general lack of population data for the late medieval period,24 it is commonly accepted in the literature that the Black Death and recurring plagues of the Second Pandemic did not have equitable demographic consequences across the whole of Europe. While some European regions experienced comparatively quick and full demographic recoveries, others underwent long term stagnation or even further decline.25 A comparison can be made between England and Wales where the population did not recover to its pre-plague level until well into the eighteenth century, and the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas where this had already occurred during the sixteenth century. Some of the most expeditious trajectories of demographic recovery, however, were displayed by parts of the Low Countries where the population reached its pre-plague size during some stage of the fifteenth century.26 17 van Bavel, Buringh and Dijkman, ‘Mills, cranes and the great divergence’; Borsch, The Black Death. 18 The Little Divergence can be defined as the process by which the North Sea Area (the Low Countries and the United Kingdom) was able to develop into the most dynamic and affluent part of Europe, see: De Pleijt and van Zanden, J.