1349 - The Great Pestilence (The Black Death) Swept Through St Austell

The Black Death, which swept through Europe, Asia and Africa in the mid-14th century, devastated communities on an unprecedented scale. In Europe alone, it is estimated to have claimed millions of lives. Cornwall was not spared, with communities around St Austell, Par and Pentewan feeling its dreadful impact. The surviving records of Tewington Manor capture the plague's effects, offering a rare glimpse into how daily life and the local economy were upended. These records are particularly valuable because they move the story away from later tradition and bring us much closer to the people who actually experienced the pestilence in 1349.

One such account, recorded by John Simund, the reeve under-steward of Tewington Manor in 1349, notes: “And for chevage of two natives by the year, at the feast of St. Michael, and no more, because seven chevagers, who were accustomed to render yearly 7d, died in April and May by the pestilence happening this year, and for 1d, for dead wood,” and similar entries. Chevage, otherwise known as chiefage, was a sum of money paid by villeins, or unfree peasants, to their lords in acknowledgement of their servitude. This detail illustrates not only the loss of life, but also how traditional feudal payments were interrupted because so many of those who would normally have paid them had perished.

The records also mention: “For the toll of tin nothing this year, for default of working.” Tin was one of the most important industries in medieval Cornwall, and the absence of tolls indicates that working had been seriously interrupted. The entry does not tell us precisely how many tinners died. Still, it demonstrates that the effects of the pestilence extended beyond agriculture and the manor itself into the wider local economy. Further evidence of the devastation appears in another account which states that fines could not be levied because “the greatest part of the tenants are dead, through the pestilence happening this year, before the feast of Easter,” while those tenants who remained wished to leave their holdings through poverty unless their fines were reduced. The lord’s council therefore remitted the fines so that the tenements might not stand empty. Here we can see the social consequences of the disaster particularly clearly: the plague killed tenants in such numbers that the traditional financial obligations of those who survived had to be relaxed simply to prevent further abandonment of the manor.

The record also notes that “The mill of Wallan (Gwallon) (Longstone area) came into the hands of the lord by the pestilence, and the lord had their goods.” When tenants died without the normal succession to their holdings, property and goods could fall back into the hands of the lord. Collectively, these entries paint a vivid picture of a society reeling from loss, with economic, social and feudal systems struggling to adapt in the face of overwhelming mortality and disruption. They also provide firm evidence that the Great Pestilence was affecting the St Austell district during the spring of 1349.

Further evidence as to how the Great Pestilence spread through Cornwall can be found in Francis Aidan Gasquet’s The Great Pestilence A.D. 1348-9, published in 1893. Gasquet made extensive use of episcopal registers, particularly those recording the institution of clergy to vacant livings, and these provide a fascinating indication of the progress of the disease through Devon and Cornwall. The two counties then formed the Diocese of Exeter, and during the eight years preceding 1348 the average number of livings becoming vacant each year was only thirty-six. In January 1349 alone, however, the Bishop instituted clergy to some thirty livings, showing that death was already making considerable inroads among the clergy. Gasquet states that there were 382 vacancies during 1349 and considered that approximately 346 might reasonably be attributed to the prevailing sickness. The effect continued for several years, and the normal average was not reached again until 1353. These figures relate to Devon and Cornwall together and should not be treated as a measure of Cornish mortality alone, but they demonstrate the extraordinary scale of the epidemic in the Diocese of Exeter.

Of particular interest is Gasquet’s attempt to trace the movement of the pestilence along the River Fowey. He observed that coastal communities appeared to have suffered greatly and considered it probable that infection was sometimes carried from one place to another by fishing boats and other vessels. He then noted that the passage of the disease up certain estuaries appeared to be reflected in the dates upon which new clergy were instituted to vacant livings. Turning specifically to Cornwall, he wrote that in March 1349 there was an institution to a living at the mouth of the Fowey; a week later another occurred at St. Winnow’s Vicarage farther upstream; and on 22 March the sickness had reached Bodmin, which he described as being at no great distance from the river and a place with which passage up the Fowey estuary would in all probability have been an ordinary and usual means of communication. It is impossible to say with certainty that these appointments record the actual progress of the disease up the river, and Gasquet presented the suggestion as an interpretation of the evidence rather than an established fact. Nevertheless, the sequence is remarkable, particularly when compared with the Tewington accounts, which record plague deaths in the St Austell district only weeks later.

Gasquet’s work attracted attention in Cornwall almost immediately. Reporting on the subject on 31 May 1894, the Royal Cornwall Gazette noted that some incumbencies during the epidemic lasted only a few weeks, adding: “Fowey for instance, and St. Winnow soon after, Bodmin following.” The same report recorded that the Prior of Minster died on 26 April 1349 and that the house became so impoverished through the deaths of tenants and labourers that it could not properly support its members and the chaplain it was obliged to provide. At Bodmin the mortality was said to have been terrible, with 1,500 deaths reported and only two members of the priory left alive. Whatever the precise number of inhabitants who died, the surviving ecclesiastical evidence leaves little doubt that Bodmin suffered severely.

A curious later story attempted to explain how the Black Death came to Bodmin. A newspaper account entitled “Plagues in Cornwall” related that on 13 February 1350 a party of carriers entered the town with pack mules laden with rich merchandise, principally garments. The townspeople, accustomed to seeing smuggled goods and articles recovered from wrecked vessels offered for sale, apparently saw no reason to be cautious and purchased them. Soon afterwards a strange sickness was said to have broken out, killing some 1,500 people, and it was eventually claimed that the clothing had belonged to Londoners who had died during the Black Death. It is a fascinating story, but the surviving medieval evidence demonstrates that it cannot explain the original arrival of the pestilence at Bodmin. Gasquet’s examination of the episcopal register places sickness at Bodmin by 22 March 1349, almost eleven months before the carriers were supposedly selling their infected garments. The story may therefore represent a later tradition attached to the very real and terrible mortality experienced at Bodmin rather than an accurate account of how the disease first reached the town.

The economic consequences revealed in Gasquet’s later chapters bear a remarkable resemblance to those found in the Tewington accounts. A bundle of accounts for the Duchy of Lancaster provides a picture of the effects of the pestilence in Cornwall after the first outbreak. Holdings are recorded for which there were no buyers; tenants had died “in the pestilence”; pasture formerly let for 3s. 4d. fetched only 20d.; numerous tenements and hundreds of acres remained in the lord’s hands; and in places entire hamlets were described as depopulated. At Tintagel the fifty shillings formerly paid each year as a stipend to the chaplain was not paid because no one would stay there to minister for that amount. At Helston, an inventory was made of goods which had fallen into the hands of the Black Prince, presumably following the deaths of tenants without heirs. The list included household possessions, agricultural equipment and personal belongings, and the total value was £16 18s. 8d. Behind these figures were individual households whose occupants had disappeared.

The situation had become so serious that on 29 May 1350 the Black Prince authorised his officials to remit one quarter of the rents owed by the tenants who remained, fearing that otherwise poverty would force them to abandon their holdings. This is particularly interesting when compared with the Tewington Manor account for 1349, where essentially the same problem was already occurring around St Austell. There the greatest part of the tenants were said to have died through the pestilence, while those who remained wished to leave their tenures because of poverty unless their fines were reduced. Recovery was painfully slow. John Tremayn, receiver of the Prince’s revenues in Cornwall, reported that even in 1352 and 1353 he had been unable to let numerous lands and tenements because they remained unoccupied, the lands lying waste for want of tenants in place of those who had died during the mortal pestilence. Several years after the terrible spring of 1349, the landscape and economy of Cornwall were therefore still bearing its scars.

The economic evidence is equally important, although broad statements that half the farms in Cornwall were abandoned or that tin production fell by a particular percentage require firmer evidence before they can safely be repeated. For St Austell there is no need to depend upon such generalisations. The Tewington account itself provides unusually direct local testimony: tenants had died, others wished to surrender their holdings through poverty, fines had to be remitted to prevent tenements from standing empty, and the lord received nothing from the toll of tin 'for default of working.' The Duchy accounts examined by Gasquet show the same pattern elsewhere in Cornwall, with holdings and acres remaining in hand, rents falling, pasture values declining and property reverting to the lord after the deaths of tenants. In this wider context the brief entries in John Simund's account cease to be isolated bookkeeping details and become part of the surviving record of a profound disruption of labour, landholding and production across medieval Cornwall.

Bodmin provides one of the most striking Cornish indications of mortality. The often repeated figure of 1,500 deaths is not simply a modern estimate or a product of the later story about infected clothing. William Worcester, writing in the fifteenth century, recorded information which he had seen in the register of the Franciscan or Grey Friars at Bodmin, giving approximately 1,500 deaths during the pestilence. The original register is no longer available to us, and the number is plainly a round figure rather than an exact death roll, but it has a much older documentary pedigree than the later folklore. The devastation of Bodmin's religious houses provides supporting evidence for a catastrophe on a very large scale: the Augustinian priory lost its prior and all but two of its brethren. Elsewhere, the longer consequences of plague can also be detected. Truro was described in 1378 as almost entirely desolated and waste, and was still being described in the early fifteenth century as impoverished by pestilence and death. These examples should not be converted into precise percentages without supporting population records, but they demonstrate how long the consequences of repeated mortality could remain visible in Cornish towns and institutions.

The scale of what happened at Tewington becomes clearer when it is placed beside modern attempts to reconstruct the population of medieval Cornwall. Estimates suggest that the county may have contained roughly 90,000 to 100,000 inhabitants in the 1330s, compared with perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 by 1377. These figures are reconstructions rather than medieval census totals, and the decline cannot all be attributed to the first visitation of 1349, for further outbreaks of pestilence followed, including the severe epidemic of 1360-62. Nevertheless, they give some indication of the demographic upheaval which Cornwall experienced during the second half of the fourteenth century. The surviving records of the Church provide another measure of that upheaval. Modern calculations based upon institutions to Cornish benefices suggest clerical mortality of about forty per cent, while one account records that twelve of the fourteen priests in the Deanery of Penwith died. Such figures must be treated with care, since an institution records the filling of a vacancy rather than necessarily the cause of the previous incumbent's death, but the extraordinary rise in vacancies during the pestilence is unmistakable and agrees with the evidence preserved in Bishop Grandisson's register for the Diocese of Exeter.

The disease responsible for the Great Pestilence is now known to have been caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Although the Black Death is principally associated with bubonic plague and the characteristic swollen lymph nodes, or ‘buboes’, the infection could also develop into septicaemic plague, in which the bloodstream became overwhelmed by infection, or pneumonic plague, which affected the lungs and could pass directly between people in close contact. It is therefore more accurate to describe the catastrophe of 1349 as plague caused by Yersinia pestis rather than to assume that every victim suffered from the bubonic form. Medieval descriptions of people falling ill and dying with extraordinary speed may be consistent with severe forms of plague, but without individual clinical evidence it is impossible to determine which form killed a particular person.

Tragically, Sir John de Trewythosa, who served as a chantry priest of St Austell during this period, was among those recorded in my earlier research as having been lost during the epidemic. This local identification remains an important research point, and the original ecclesiastical or manorial source should be traced before publication, but it serves as a reminder that the mortality represented in the Tewington accounts was not merely a matter of rents, mills and abandoned holdings: individual people within the religious and working life of St Austell disappeared as the pestilence passed through the district.

The plague did not disappear permanently with the fourteenth century. St Austell faced plague again during the seventeenth century, and my earlier research recorded the story of the vicar Joseph May, who tended the sick and oversaw the burial of the dead while apparently escaping the disease himself. This belongs to a much later outbreak and should not be confused with the Great Pestilence of 1349, but it forms part of the longer history of plague in the St Austell district. The survival of such a story also gives a more personal dimension to the later epidemic, showing the responsibilities that could fall upon a parish clergyman when ordinary community life was overwhelmed by disease and death.

Taken together, the records allow us to follow something of the progress and consequences of the Great Pestilence through Cornwall. Gasquet’s evidence suggests a possible sequence from the mouth of the River Fowey to St Winnow and Bodmin during March 1349, while the Tewington Manor accounts record the pestilence devastating communities around St Austell before Easter and during April and May. Whether the disease travelled directly from the Fowey into the St Austell district cannot now be proved, but the chronology is striking. What can be demonstrated is that within a matter of weeks communities across this part of Cornwall were experiencing exceptional mortality, abandoned holdings, interrupted industry and a collapse in the ordinary payments upon which medieval estates depended. The missing chevage payments, the absence of tin tolls, the empty tenements and the land lying waste provide perhaps the most poignant testimony of all, for behind each brief entry in an account book stood people whose lives had been swept away by the Great Pestilence.

During my research into the Black Death at St Austell, I visited Holcombe in Somerset, where the old church of St Andrew stands approximately a mile from the present village. It is an extraordinary place, for around the isolated church are the remains of a deserted medieval settlement, recognised as such by Historic England. Local tradition maintains that the old village was devastated by the Black Death of 1348-49 and that the few inhabitants who survived abandoned their homes and established themselves on the site of the present village. The earthworks and mounds surrounding the church are still clearly visible, and standing amongst them it is easy to understand how such a tradition arose. There is, however, little surviving historical evidence proving that the Black Death itself caused the abandonment, and the local Village Design Statement is careful to acknowledge this. Holcombe therefore provides an interesting example not only of a genuine deserted medieval settlement, but also of the way in which the memory of the Great Pestilence became attached to the landscape. Local folklore even connects Holcombe with Ring a Ring o' Roses, although this association is much later; the village public house formerly bearing that name was renamed in the twentieth century to reflect the plague tradition.

Written by Lyndon Allen, 2025