No.129
The Trusty Servant
A plague on all the houses:
an epidemiological history of Win Coll
The Editor, Tim Giddings, examines
the School’s previous encounters with
epidemics:
I am under strict instructions from
the experts not to begin this article
with the simplistic assertion that
Winchester College was founded
to train replacement priests for
those killed in the Black Death.
That outbreak of bubonic plague
in 1348-9, which killed somewhere
between a third and half of England’s
population, did indeed take a terrible
toll on Winchester – no surprise when
the entry-point for the plague into
England was nearby Melcombe, today
part of Weymouth. The area which
Wykehamists call Hills Valley is also
known as Plague Pits Valley, because
mass graves were dug there once
the city’s cemeteries were full. And
clerics were hit hardest of all: 49% of
beneficed clergy in the diocese died
Plague monument,
G Shepherd, 1826, watercolour
(and 44% of monks), making it the
worst-affected diocese in the country.
William of Wykeham’s predecessor
as bishop, William Edington, had to
fill 300 parish vacancies in 1349, as
opposed to the normal number of
about 12. However, when Wykeham
founded the school over three
decades later in 1382, that particular
recruitment crisis was long in the past.
Nevertheless, there was a recruitment
crisis in Wykeham’s episcopate (which
began in 1367). It was not so much
that plague-induced gaps needing
filling, but that normal gaps were
no longer being filled. The numbers
coming forward for ordination had
drastically reduced since the Black
Death. In the two decades before that
epidemic it was not unusual for over
100 men to be ordained at just one
of the four annual ceremonies in the
Winchester diocese. In 1362, when
Wykeham himself was ordained, only
19 men were ordained in the whole
year; in 1371, a meagre 33. And only
a minority of these would have ended
up as beneficed clerics. Some of this
decline can be attributed directly to
plague: the Black Death was just the
first of 31 outbreaks in late medieval
England, and a smaller population
would produce proportionally fewer
priests. But the bigger effect was
indirect: the population decline
expanded the opportunities for
ambitious young men, tempting
potential priests into rival careers. A
freer market in land allowed smaller
operators to build up larger holdings.
Renewal of the wars against the
French and Scots offered the rewards
of military success. And an enormous
expansion of legal activity created a
need for many more lawyers. Those
3
who in the previous generation
might have opted for ordination now
had better opportunities available
elsewhere.
So Wykeham did want more priests.
But he also wanted more educated
priests, and greater opportunities for
poor pupils to be those priests – pupils
from a similar background to himself,
the son of a Hampshire yeoman. It
is these latter two concerns which
are most prominent in Wykeham’s
Foundation Charter of 1382. In fact,
no mention at all is made of the
Black Death or any other plague in
Winchester’s Charter or Statutes.
The New College Charter (1379)
does mention that the number of
clerks had been affected by ‘epidemics
and general pestilences, wars and
disasters, rising food prices and
other misfortunes’, but this is more
a generic catalogue of the repeated
plural ills of the 14 th century than
a specific reference to the disaster
of 1348. The Winchester Charter is
much more focused on educational
philanthropy: he wished to benefit
the ‘poor and needy’, ‘the many poor
scholars intent on school studies
suffering from want of money and
poverty’. He wanted them to be
able to ‘become more amply and
freely proficient in the faculty and
science of grammar’. His experience
of examining candidates for
presentation to benefices had made
it clear that the educational levels of
the priesthood needed enhancing: in
1381 he compelled one presentee to
pay a chaplain to do his parochial
duties while he ‘regularly attended
a grammar school… that he might
become sufficiently instructed in
grammar and plainsong.’