Black Death in England

• 1. Introduction

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  The Black Death reached England in June 1348, carried ashore by a single seaman who docked at Weymouth, Dorset, arriving from the English province of Gascony. Within eighteen months, a disease that had never before touched these shores would kill somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the entire population. That is not a misprint. Depending on which historian's estimate you accept, England may have lost more than half its people in little over a year.

  The name "Black Death" was not actually used at the time. Contemporaries called it the "Great Pestilence" or the "Great Mortality". The familiar name only became common in the 17th century, probably borrowed from Scandinavian languages. Those who lived through it had no dramatic label for it. They simply watched their neighbors, their priests, and their children die.

  What drove this catastrophe? What did medieval medicine actually attempt as a cure? How did a single plague reshape English wages, politics, literature, and the relationship between the people and the Church? And once the first wave passed, was it truly over? The answers reveal a society transformed at every level, from the grandest cathedral building projects to the humblest tenant farmer's daily wage.

• 2. The Disease Itself

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  Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind the Black Death, is carried by fleas. Those fleas travel on rats, and when a flea bites a human, it deposits the bacteria into the lymphatic system. From there, the bacteria multiply inside the lymph nodes and create the swellings called buboes, which give bubonic plague its name. After three or four days in the lymph nodes, the bacteria enter the bloodstream, attacking organs including the spleen and lungs. Death typically followed within a few more days.

  A study reported in 2011 confirmed Y. pestis DNA in skeletons exhumed from the Black Death cemetery at East Smithfield in London. A separate archaeological dig near Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire, reported in November 2016, found the same DNA in human remains dated to mid-1349. Genotyping showed this was a newly evolved strain, the ancestor of all modern strains. Because it was new, the human immune system had little or no prior defence, helping explain why the death tolls were so staggering.

  Bubonic plague was not the only form killing people. Pneumonic plague, where the bacteria become airborne and infect the lungs directly, spreads from person to person without needing a flea as intermediary. This strain is far more virulent. A rarer third form, septicaemic plague, carries the bacteria directly into the bloodstream from a flea bite, and death occurs very rapidly. All three strains likely contributed to the English catastrophe.

  The disease seems to have originated in Central Asia, where Y. pestis is endemic in rodent populations. It reached Constantinople in the late spring of 1347 through Genoese merchants trading in the Black Sea, arrived in Sicily in October of that year, and had spread across the entire Italian mainland by early 1348. By June 1348 it had reached Paris and, simultaneously moving westward, the English province of Gascony, the very territory from which the Weymouth seaman had sailed.

• 3. Across England

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  The chronicle of the grey friars at King's Lynn places the plague's arrival by ship from Gascony at Melcombe, the Weymouth harbour, shortly before the Feast of St. John the Baptist on the 24th of June 1348. Other sources name Bristol and Southampton as entry points, and Bristol may well have received an independent arrival later. If the chronicle is recording the first outbreak rather than the literal moment of arrival, the actual landing most likely happened around the 8th of May.

  From Weymouth the disease moved rapidly across the south-west. Bristol fell first among the major cities. London was reached in autumn 1348, before most of the surrounding countryside had been infected. The plague travelled to the capital by three routes: overland from Weymouth through Salisbury and Winchester; overland from Gloucester; and by sea along the coast. The streets of London were narrow, sewage ran openly, and houses were overcrowded and poorly ventilated. The full devastation was felt in the capital in early 1349.

  By March 1349 the disease was spreading haphazardly across all of southern England. A second front opened when the plague arrived by ship at the Humber estuary and spread outward from there. York was reached in May 1349. Through June, July, and August, the north was ravaged. Counties like Durham and Cumberland, already weakened by violent Scottish incursions, proved especially vulnerable.

  Pestilence spreads more slowly in cold months, and the Black Death in England survived the winter of 1348-49 before subsiding in the next winter. By December 1349 conditions were returning to something resembling normality. From arrival to subsidence, the disease had taken roughly 500 days to traverse the entire country.

• 4. Counting the Dead

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  Josiah William Russell's 1948 work "British Medieval Population" was the pioneering attempt to quantify the death toll. Russell examined inquisitions post mortem, documents the Crown used to assess the wealth of the greatest landowners after they died, and arrived at an overall mortality estimate of 23.6 percent of the population. He also studied episcopal registers for clergy deaths, which showed rates of 30 to 40 percent, but he believed clergy were at special risk and ultimately settled on an overall mortality of only around 20 percent.

  Subsequent scholars pushed those numbers sharply upward. Philip Ziegler, writing in 1969, estimated roughly one third of the population had died. Jeremy Goldberg, in 1996, put the figure closer to 45 percent. A 2004 study by Ole Jørgen Benedictow proposed an exceptionally high mortality level of 62.5 percent. Assuming a starting population of 6 million people, that would correspond to approximately 3,750,000 deaths, placing England above even Benedictow's estimated Western European average of 60 percent.

  In 2016, Carenza Lewis introduced a fresh approach using pottery. She argued that the shift from the high medieval to the late medieval pottery style happened precisely at the time of the Black Death, making shards of each style useful proxies for population change. Lewis and her colleagues examined pottery from test pits in more than 50 continuously occupied rural settlements in eastern England. They found a decline of 45 percent in the number of pottery-producing pits. Norfolk showed the greatest drop, at 65 percent, while about 10 percent of settlements, mostly commercial centres, showed no drop at all.

  The manor of Aston, on the estates of the Bishop of Worcester, illustrates the extreme local variation. While the bishop's manors of Hartlebury and Hanbury recorded a mortality rate of only 19 percent, Aston lost as much as 80 percent of its population.

• 5. Medicine and the Body

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  Bloodletting, forced sweating, induced vomiting, and forced urination were among the treatments physicians attempted. Symptoms included blotches on the skin, hardening of the glands under the groin and armpits, and dementia. When performing bloodletting, physicians bled a vein on the same side of the body where a bubo had appeared: if the swelling was on the right side of the groin, the physician would open a vein in the ankle on the same right side.

  To bring on sweating, practitioners used substances including Mithridate, Venice-Treacle, Matthiolus, Bezoar-Water, Serpentary Roots, and Electuarium de Ovo. If a patient had reached the stage of "tokens", a severe form of the risings, the physician would wrap the naked patient in a cold, water-drenched blanket to force violent sweating, aiming to purge the corruption from the blood.

  The treatment of swellings depended on their appearance. White, deep swellings unlikely to break were anointed with Oil of Lillies or Camomil. When a swelling rose to a red head near the surface, it was lanced using a feather from the tail of a young pigeon held against the wound to draw out the venom. If a swelling turned black, the physician would cut open a living young pigeon from breast to back, break it open, and apply the bird directly over the cold swelling. An alternative was cupping therapy, using heated cups placed over the swelling. Once broken, sores were treated with Mellilot Plaister combined with Linimentum Arcei.

  Many physicians during the peak outbreak years of 1348-1350 believed the plague had been sent by God as punishment for sin, citing biblical parallels including the seven plagues of Egypt and the swellings that afflicted those who stole the Ark of the Covenant. Physicians holding this view skipped physical treatments entirely, prescribing confession and prayer instead. Others, believing illness arose from breathing bad air, had patients inhale the smoke of fires or the scent of strong-smelling herbs and sweet-smelling flowers.

• 6. Who Died and Who Survived

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  Edward III's daughter Joan was residing in Bordeaux in the summer of 1348, travelling to marry Pedro of Castile. When the plague broke out within her household she was moved to a small nearby village, but she could not escape infection. She died there on the 2nd of September. Joan was the only member of the English royal family confirmed with any certainty to have died from the Black Death, and her death occurred in France rather than England.

  The religious author Richard Rolle, who died on the 30th of September 1349, is considered a possible plague victim. The philosopher William of Ockham has also been named as a possible victim, but the source makes clear this is impossible: Ockham died in Munich on the 10th of April 1347, a full two years before the Black Death reached that city.

  Clergy died at especially high rates. In the archdiocese of York, estimates suggest clergy mortality in some parts may have reached 48 percent. Archbishop Zouche of York had already issued a warning to his diocese in July 1348, when the epidemic was still raging further south, cautioning of "great mortalities, pestilences and infections of the air". The ordination records show a massive surge in new clergy: in 1346, 111 priests and 337 acolytes were recruited. In 1349, the numbers were 299 priests and 683 acolytes, with 166 priests ordained in a single session in February 1350 alone.

  Studies of manor rolls suggest that peasant death rates were higher than Russell's earlier estimates had allowed. The wealthier classes had the option to flee infected areas, and survivors among the affluent likely had better access to nursing and care. The most vulnerable groups identified by the inquisitions post mortem were infants and the elderly.

• 7. Wages, Revolt, and the Law

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  In 1349, King Edward III responded to the crisis by passing the Ordinance of Labourers, fixing wages at pre-plague levels. Parliament reinforced this with the Statute of Labourers in 1351. The landowners saw rising wages as social insubordination, and the laws were enforced ruthlessly over the following decades.

  The labour laws failed to hold the market in check. Worse, the government's coercive attempts to enforce them generated deep public resentment. These conditions fed directly into the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The rebellion started in Kent and Essex in late May of that year. When the rebels reached London they burned down John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace and killed both the Chancellor and the Treasurer. They demanded the complete abolition of serfdom and were not pacified until the young King Richard II personally intervened.

  The rebellion was suppressed, but the social changes it had accelerated could not be reversed. By around 1400, serfdom was virtually extinct in England, replaced by the form of tenure known as copyhold. The administrators credited with guiding the country through the worst of the crisis included Treasurer William de Shareshull and Chief Justice William Edington. The plague's most direct impact on English foreign policy was that no major military campaigns were launched in France until 1355.

  The long-term wage increase produced an economic paradox for the gentry. Higher worker wages combined with falling grain prices put the gentry under financial strain. They responded by seeking offices such as justice of the peace, sheriff, and member of parliament, and took advantage of these positions through what sources describe as more systematic corruption than before, making the gentry as a group deeply unpopular with ordinary people.

• 8. Return Visits

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  The pestis secunda, the so-called second pestilence, returned to England in 1361-62 and may have killed around 20 percent of the population. Genetic analysis of remains from the abbey of St. Mary's Graces, dated between 1353 and 1364, found the pPCP1 plasmid, a plasmid found only in Yersinia pestis and not in the related environmental agent Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, confirming the same bacterium was responsible. This second wave was particularly damaging to population recovery because it struck infants and young men disproportionately. The next recurrence, in 1369, killed an estimated 10-15 percent.

  Over the following decades the plague returned on national or regional scales at intervals of five to twelve years, with gradually diminishing death tolls. Then, in the decades from 1430 to 1480, the disease returned in force. An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10-15 percent of the population, and the plague of 1479-1480 may have killed as many as 20 percent.

  Governments began to respond with deliberate containment measures from the late 15th century onward. These included quarantines on people and goods from infected areas, bans on public gatherings such as fairs, enforced household quarantine for the infected, and quarantines applied to ships and crews arriving from ports with active outbreaks. From the early 17th century, purpose-built quarantine facilities called pesthouses began replacing household quarantine. The Forlorn Hope Pesthouse established by Bristol in 1665-66 appears to have functioned as a proper quarantine hospital staffed by doctors, and the city's death rate in that outbreak was recorded at only around 0.6 percent. This stood in stark contrast to Bristol's earlier plague epidemics of 1565, 1575-1603-1604, and 1645, which each saw mortality of 10-20 percent.

  The Great Plague of 1665-66, best known for the Great Plague of London, was the last major outbreak in England. London alone lost 100,000 people, representing 20 percent of the capital's population. Among the other places badly affected were Eyam in Derbyshire, Derby itself, and Norwich. Between that final epidemic and the first arrival at Weymouth in 1348, the plague had revisited England across more than three centuries.