The plague and its saints: town vows, chapels and processions (1347-1722)

The ship of November 1347

The plague enters France by sea. In November 1347, galleys from the East, by way of Sicily and Genoa, put in at Marseille; in January 1348 the sickness is at Avignon, where Pope Clement VI resides; in February at Montpellier, in March at Carcassonne. It moves up the Rhône, reaches Lyon around April, Bordeaux in June, Paris in August; Brittany and Auvergne are not struck until 1349; at Saint-Flour, the consuls' registers count some 1,300 taxable hearths in 1341, and 938 in 1349. Guy de Chauliac, physician to Clement VI, observed it at close quarters and notes in his Grande Chirurgie, in substance, that the mortality began among them, at Avignon, in the month of January 1348 and lasted seven months: two months of continuous fever and spitting of blood, of which people died in three days, then apostemes and carbuncles in the groin and armpits, of which they died in five. It was so contagious, he writes, that people died without servants and were buried without priests; physicians no longer dared to visit the sick; he himself, so as not to incur infamy, stayed, caught the fever and an aposteme in the groin, and recovered. A Fleming of Cardinal Colonna's household, Louis Heyligen, writes from Avignon on 27 April 1348 that the pope has bought a field to make a cemetery of it and has consecrated the Rhône so that bodies may be thrown into it. In Paris, the Carmelite Jean de Venette would say that the Hôtel-Dieu was burying more than five hundred dead a day.