Mortality in Hainaut

A sprinkling of mortality data is available with respect to the Black Death in Belgium. A few data relate to the County of Hainaut. Manorial account books registering traditional death duties payable by tenants in the form of the holding’s best beast, called ‘heriots’, reveal sharply increased death rates among the peasants in the countryside of the southern and central parts of the County of Hainaut from the summer of 1349. Unfortunately, there are no earlier registers that can serve as a base for comparison. If the number of deaths in the corresponding period of 1358–9 is used as a comparative basis constituting an index of 100, the level of mortality in the district of Ath (50 km north of Valencienne) in the period 24 June 1349–11 April 1350 was more than five times higher, at 533; in the district of Maubeuge (40 km east of Valencienne) the level of mortality was 480; and in the district of Soignies (about 20 km north of Mons), 253. There can be no doubt that these figures greatly underestimate the real increases in mortality because the population in 1358 must be assumed to have been much smaller than on the eve of the Black Death in the summer of 1349. In addition, the mortality figures relating to the time of the Black Death are minimum figures because the registers are in such a bad state that parts of the folios have been lost or the writing has become illegible.

The death of householders/tenants would often create human and social problems that might well cause delayed payment of heriots (death duty payable by inheritors). Nonetheless, at least a considerable part of the quite high number of payments of heriots in the ensuing years undoubtedly reflects that the Black Death was still spreading in this very densely populated countryside of Belgium: the district of Maubeuge, for instance, which had suffered 231 deaths as reflected in payments of heriots in 1349–50, recorded an additional 98 deaths in the period 25 April 1351–1 May 1352.

Two villages situated centrally in the district of Ath in western Hainaut, namely Hyon and Hon, are registered with 14 and 7 payments of animal heriots, respectively, in 1349–50, and with only 1 and 0, respectively, in 1353–4.