Plymouth Read Free

immodest clothing or even disobedient children for the onset of the Black Death. The apocalypse was nigh, it seemed. King Edward III pronounced to the bishops:

    For we hope that if, by God’s grace, the people drive out this spiritual weakness from their hearts, the malignancy of the air and of the other elements will also depart.

    It was all to no avail: the clergy themselves died in ever-increasing numbers. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury perished in 1349. Between January and September 1349, nearly 350 of the clergy in the priories and abbeys of Devon and Cornwall succumbed to the disease. The records specific to Plymouth for 1348 and 1349 have been lost, but in 1349 the Priory at Plympton made a desperate plea to the authorities to permit them to invest underage and illegitimate boys – there were just not enough men left alive in Plymouth to take on the necessary duties at the Priory.
    In 1882 Arthur Conan Doyle, later to become famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, arrived in Stonehouse as a newly qualified physician to work in the practice of Dr George Budd – a plaque on Durnford Street marks the house. Conan Doyle was rather surprised by Dr Budd’s bizarre ideas for curing the sick. On one occasion, a young girl with an irritating cough was placed on the mantelpiece and warned that if she coughed again she would fall into the fire and burn. Dr Budd and Conan Doyle then tried to cure a man with lockjaw by throwing food at each other, thereby making the poor man laugh. Conan Doyle quickly moved to Southsea.
    The Black Friars’ Distillery, now owned by Plymouth Gin, is said to be haunted. The distillery is all that remains of the Black Friar’s Monastery that was near Sutton Pool, and the building was used over the years as a debtors’ prison, a refuge for asylum-seeking Huguenots and the last place in England where the pilgrims rested before heading off on the Mayflower . Part of the building was also hit by German fire bombs in the Second World War at a time when it was an air-raid shelter. A monk-like figure has been sighted in various rooms, and the ladies’ restroom is haunted by a woman who was reportedly stabbed there.

    The Black Friars’ Distillery, now Plymouth Gin, at the Barbican.
    As the Black Death spread from village to village, society fell apart. Livestock roamed free, crops went untended, and people died of starvation as well as disease. Women who survived the plague were often left barren for many years afterwards, too weak to bear children.
    Just as the first wave of the epidemic abated, as the population seemed to stabilise and recover, the second and third plagues arrived, perhaps less virulent but seeming to concentrate on the young born since the first plague. In the mid-1300s, entire generations were decimated.
    The plague hit Plymouth and the surrounding towns again and again over the centuries. In 1580, 26 shillings was raised in Plymouth to relieve Kingsbridge people suffering another outbreak. In 1590 four men were paid to keep watch in Plymouth, to maintain the areas of quarantine and ensure local people were kept away from the infected areas, but they seem to have failed in their task – in 1594 Roger Swinsbury, his wife and their two sons all died of the plague. In 1624 houses in Oreston and ships in the harbour were searched for another suspected outbreak, which then hit the prison – the stink of the infected was so horrendous that a man called John Page was paid to scrub the prison clean. Poor John then had the gruesome task of establishing a ‘plague house’ in the fields just outside Plymouth, to remove the plague victims from the town and into quarantine.

AD 1296-1404
THE BLACK PRINCE AND FRENCH FIRE
    W HILE PLYMOUTH WAS suffering outbreaks of plague, it was also under attack from the French.
    In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the English Kings still saw France as their ancestral homeland. Having inherited vast lands from the Normans, they owned more of