Farnham’s Deadliest Year?

In the early months of 2020, Covid-19 spread rapidly across the world, bringing fear, uncertainty and a sudden awareness of how vulnerable society could become to infectious disease.

Now imagine if, instead of around 3% of the population dying, between a third and a half of your town had perished.

That was the reality facing Farnham in 1348.

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At the time, Farnham was a small market town of perhaps just two or three thousand people. The Black Death — caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis — arrived in England through southern ports before spreading inland with devastating speed. Contemporary reports suggest communities around Tongham and Tilford may have been among the first locally affected.

For the people of medieval Farnham, the plague was intensely personal. Victims were not distant statistics but neighbours, relatives, traders and fellow labourers. Entire households disappeared within weeks.

The Triumph of Death by Giacomo Borlone de Burchis, Oratorio dei Disciplini, Clusone, Italy

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The official pipe roll accounts of the Bishopric of Winchester reveal the scale of the catastrophe. By the autumn of 1348, deaths in Farnham had risen dramatically. Among those lost was William Waryn of Elstead, Reeve for the Castle and Manor of Farnham, responsible for collecting taxes and managing estate affairs on behalf of Bishop William Edington.

One particular tax, the heriot, required a deceased tenant’s best animal to be surrendered to the Bishop.

Before the plague, only three animals had been collected in Farnham between spring 1347 and early 1348. During the following year, that number soared to 133.

Bishop William Edington had only been consecrated in May 1346 - just two years earlier. He told his flock that the plague was a punishment for their sins but, despite the many prayers the people of his diocese were instructed to offer, lives were continuously lost.

Bishop Edington quickly had to find a replacement for William Waryn and was fortunate in his appointment of John Runwick as his new reeve, reputedly one of the most capable estate managers in the country. Runwick now faced an overwhelming task. Due to the heriot tax, livestock flooded into the Bishop’s possession faster than they could be managed. Some animals were kept alive in pasture, but many had to be slaughtered.

Inside Farnham Castle’s Great Hall, carcasses were salted, butchered and preserved to stock the Bishop’s larder for future visits. Even within the Castle walls, daily life had become dominated by the consequences of mass death.

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By 1350, the worst of the plague had passed, but Farnham — like much of England — had been permanently changed. Labour shortages drove up wages and disrupted the medieval social order. Fields went unharvested, building works stalled, and resentment simmered among a traumatised population.

Within a generation, England would see the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The Black Death was not simply a medical catastrophe. It reshaped Farnham’s economy, society and history.