The Black Death

1348 to 1350

The impact of the Black Death on the English population

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Victims of the plague suffered from pustules, boils, abscesses, head pains and other symptoms. A typical plague victim developed large, tumour like buboes on the skin … They were painful to touch and brought on hideous deformities when they grew large…. The buboes were frequently accompanied by dark blotches, known as God’s tokens, an unmistakeable sign that the sufferer had been touched by the angel of death. Accompanying these deformities, the victim developed a hacking cough that brought up blood and developed into incessant vomiting. He gave off a disgusting stench, which seemed to leak from every part of his body … eventually he began to lose his mind, wandering around screaming, and collapsing with the suffering. (The Plantagenets, The Kings who made England, 2012, Dan Jones, page 483).

The population of Britain, and especially of England, grew steadily from the 11th to the 13th century, when it reached levels, just before the Black Death struck in 1348, that were not equalled again until the 16th century. I regard this as one of the most important statistics in British history, because the sudden drop in population, following a short pause as society adjusted to the new situation, undoubtedly triggered many fundamental social and economic changes. (Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 183).

1340s

In the 1340s, unstable climatic conditions led to an infection of humans by the bubonic plague (yersinia pestis) from marmots and gerbils in China.

It must have been at some time during 1346 that word first reached Europe of strange and tragic happenings far away in the East. Even in this age of easy travel and rapid spread of news, calamities in China tended to be accepted in the Occident, with the polite but detached regrets reserved for something infinitely remote. In the fourteenth century, Cathay was a never-never-land; unheard of except by the more sophisticated and, even to them, a place of mystery which only a few merchants had visited, and about which little was known. No story, however horrific, would seem altogether implausible if it came from such a source; but equally no mediaeval, savant or merchant would have conceived that what happened so far away could have any possible relevance to his own existence. The travellers’ tales were received with awed credulity, but gave rise to no alarm. (The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, 1969, page 3).

1347

By 1347 attacks by the Mongols on Genoese outposts in Crimea, spread the disease as far as Constantinople.

1348

The plague spread through Cyprus, Sicily, the Levant, and the Italian States. As it spread through France, black flags were raised over the infected villages.

On 28 July 1348, Archbishop Zouche of York warned his flock. Everybody knows, since the news is now widely spread, what great pestilence, mortality and infection of the air there are in diverse parts of the world and which, at this moment are threatening in particular the land of England. This surely, must be caused by the sins of men who, made complacent by their prosperity, forget the bounty of the most high Giver. Nearly ten months would elapse before the first cases in Yorkshire. (The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, 1969, page 144).

In August 1348, Edward III’s daughter, Joan, the bride for King Alfonso XI of Castile, arrived in Bordeaux, as it was gripped by the plague, la très grande mortalité. She died on 2 September 1348.

The disease arrived in Melcombe Regis (Weymouth), Dorset, aboard a ship from Gascony in May 1348.

The first cases in England spread through Wiltshire, Hampshire and Surrey.

There was no memory of death so stern and cruel since the time of Vortigern, King of the Britons, in whose day, as Bede testifies, the living did not suffice to bury the dead (Henry Knighton).

Until the moment that the plague reached his village, even, indeed, when it was already rampant, the average northerner continued to till his fields, tend his cattle and perform his manorial duties. The threat of infection was not enough; only death, It seemed, could distract him from his daily duties. (The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, 1969, page 145).

1349

The Black Death spread throughout the country. The first cases reached Yorkshire in about May 1349. Though the mortality in Yorkshire was not quite so wholesale as in other counties, certainly much less so than in neighbouring Lincolnshire, the Black Death was far from merciful. In the 535 parishes of the Diocese of York, of which the great majority were in Yorkshire itself, 223 benefices were vacated by death, 63 by resignation, and a further 14 from unspecified causes. Between 42% and 45% of the parish clergy died. (The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, 1969, page 145).

The Deanery of Doncaster lost nearly 59% of its clergy, yet virtually no benefices were vacated in the marches between Doncaster and the Humber. (The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, 1969, page 146).

York itself was first struck by the plague in May 1349.

Perhaps a third to half of England’s population died between 1348 and 1351. Whole communities were sometimes wiped out. The plague coincided with a devastating murrain among sheep.

Many clergy died in the plague. A friar wrote lest by chance anyone may be left in the future.

The Black Death of 1348 to 1349 was not a one off single event. There were numerous visitations of the pestilence for the next three centuries, starting in 1361. The final outbreaks in Scotland were in 1645 to 1649 and in England in 1665 to 1666; the latter was the Great Plague, recorded so memorably in his diary by Samuel Pepys, which killed about 56,000 people in London. The plagues caused great towns to shrink and villages to disappear. They also affected the way people regarded themselves and the way they lived their lives. In particular, and perhaps not surprisingly, they affected attitudes to both death and religion. So population and pestilence together helped to change the character of the late Middle Ages. (Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 185).

Bibliography

The Death of a Princess, The Plantagenets, The Kings who made England, 2012, Dan Jones, page 479.

The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, 1969.

There is an In Our Time podcast on the Black Death and another in the Gone Medieval series.