Lucy Worsley Investigates

Now, Walsham might feel like it's in the middle of nowhere, but it isn't and it wasn't in the 14th century either. It was connected, as the world was, through global shipping routes. Walsham is 100 miles away from London, but, crucially, it's only 26 miles, or a day's walk from the international port of Ipswich. Ipswich was just a day's sail from France. News of the Black Death's horrors found their way across the Channel. Most accounts coming from Europe were utterly apocalyptic. And this sounds frankly implausible. He describes here a rain of frogs, snakes, lizards and scorpions, thunderbolts and lightning, this sounds like crazy pub talk. But then, much more believably, he talks about the plague travelling via Genoese ships, to Marseille, and then to Avignon, where oh golly, where half the people have died. So, once it's got to France, that's roughly only 24 hours' journey from this village, from this pub. You can imagine people here laughing maybe, speculating, maybe really frightening themselves, as they talked about it on a Friday night. Accounts like this reached Britain throughout 1348, well before the Black Death struck Walsham. But is there evidence in the court rolls that even rumours about plague changed people's behaviour? Here's a meeting of the court from the autumn before the Black Death, and here we've got, how many men? I think it's yes, it's eleven men in total, who are in trouble because they've not turned up to work. They get fined for not doing their duties, including William Cranmer, actually. What might they have been doing instead? Well, this might be my imagination, but just up here we've got some other men who are fined, who are punished, for brewing and selling ale in breach of the assize. I am tempted to think that these eleven men thought, Right, the plague is coming, we're jolly well not going to go to work, we're going to go to the pub instead. Let's make merry, because tomorrow we die.'