The Black Death in England 1348–1349

This is the first in a mini-series of historical insights into the 14th century pandemic we call the Black Death, written with more than an eye on the sometimes uncanny resemblances it had to our own Covid-19 experience. Readers of this blog will already know that I have been researching this for my forthcoming novel, Thirteen Forty-Nine, which explores the impact of the Great Mortality, as contemporaries called it, on a fictional village in southern England. In this blog I look at what the Black Death was, where it came from, and its trajectory and effects across Europe.

The pandemic we call the Black Death probably had its origin in western Asia, and arrived in Europe in 1347 via the port of Genoa in Italy. The Genoese were well known for travelling and trading far and wide across the Medieval world, and one of the places they had settled was at Kaffa (or Caffa, now Feodosija) on the Crimean shores of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The Genoese city was established in 1266, by agreement with the Khan of the Golden Horde, the local ruler. Here they were besieged (not by the first time) by Mongol forces in 1345–46. The Genoese were supplied by boat, however, and could not be starved out. According to Gabriele de’Mussi, a Genoese notary, writing soon after the event although not an eye-witness, the Mongol forces (he called them Tartars) used biological warfare in an attempt to break the siege: they hurled the bodies of their own plague-infected soldiers into the city. The attempt failed and the city remained in Genoese hands. However, a number of the Genoese defenders took ship and sailed away, taking the disease to Europe. Given the nature of European contacts with the Near East, it was almost inevitable that the plague would have found its way to the continent. But the siege of Kaffa and the Tartars’ biological warfare is a colourful episode that caught the medieval imagination and still intrigues historians today. It shows, moreover, how transport links play an important part in pandemic transmission – something we have learned about afresh in 2020.

The Black Death arrived at the port of Genoa, where the ship and its infected sailors were promptly sent on their way by the authorities – though not in time to save the city from the disease. From southern Italy it spread across the continent through 1347 and early 1348, moving northwards steadily though affecting some places more severely than others. A number of chroniclers described it and from their accounts it seems certain that the disease was a particularly virulent version of bubonic plague. Three different types were present, in differing mixes in different places and at different seasons, which is one of the reasons why it was so devastating (another significant factor may be that since there had been no similar outbreak of plague in Europe since the 6th century few people had any immunity to it). The most prevalent type in the early part of the pandemic, in Italy and France, was bubonic plague, which had a death rate of something around 60 or 70 percent of those infected. The symptoms were the classic growths (called buboes, giving the disease its name), a high temperature and a persistent rash or blotches under the skin. But in England, partly because of the colder weather experienced during winter and spring 1348/1349, many cases were of pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs and is very much more deadly. A third and rarer type, septicaemic plague, in which the bacillus enters the bloodstream directly and overwhelms the patient extremely quickly, is almost always fatal. Since the plague is a bacterial infection not a virus, these were simply different ways the flea-borne bacillus could enter or attack the body. They were not mutations like those we see in coronavirus-type epidemics. Today all three types of plague can be treated with antibiotics, but without them it was (and is) untreatable.

The disease reached England in June 1348, in all probability making its first landfall at Melborne Regis in Dorset. It moved across the country in a single prolonged wave, but its trajectory was complex; that is, it did not enter in the south and pass uniformly northwards across the country. Instead, it followed major transport routes, spreading first westwards along the south coast, with separate nodes of infection in major ports such as Bristol on the major inlet below the Severn estuary. This almost certainly represented transmission by ships, some directly from the continent of Europe, others from internal ports. For several months after the first infections in Dorset, the interior of southern England was almost untouched, but Dorset, Devon and Somerset suffered badly in this early period. In November or December 1348 the disease came to London, with devastating effects not only medically but also socially and economically; but the route of transmission is uncertain. Again, it may have been direct infection by sailors or passengers on ships from the continent, including possibly returning soldiers from Calais after the truce that halted the Hundred Years War, albeit briefly. Thus, rather surprisingly, the disease did not hit northern Hampshire until January 1349. The evidence from the turnover of parish incumbencies, which is one of the main ways in which the statistics for this pandemic were compiled, shows that the bulk of the deaths were in the period January to March 1349, though people did continue to die of plague in much smaller numbers for the rest of the year. The records of the Bishop of Winchester are extant and have been published (by Hampshire County Council).

Over Europe as a whole the death rate from the Black Death probably approached 40 per cent – vastly more than even the notorious Spanish flu of 1918–19, and a far far cry from our 21st century experience (less than a measly 0.15 per cent so far, even on the most generous estimates) – and in England, where the pneumonic form was prevalent, it was more like 50 percent, in some places higher. On the evidence of the transfer of incumbencies, Hampshire was one of the more badly affected areas. There was no idea of social distancing, and the lockdown-type social and economic paralysis that occurred in some of the bigger centres of population – in particular London, where there is some evidence of social dislocation – happened simply because no one had leisure for anything but the most basic essential activities. The plague returned in 1361, and periodically throughout the next three centuries, never quite as destructively as the 1348–1350 outbreak, but deadly enough to keep the population of England permanently lower than its pre-plague maximum. It did not fully recover until the 18th century.

 

Thirteen Forty-Nine

 My fourth novel, set during the 14th century pandemic, will be published on 1st January 2021 by Wings ePress, under the title Thirteen Forty-Nine. I’m planning a series of blogs before that time, containing some reflections on the parallels between our own pandemic experience and that of our ancestors.

I’ve dedicated the novel to the key workers of the 2020 pandemic – frontline NHS personnel, including those working in the community, care home workers, and all the supermarket staff, delivery drivers, postmen, and others who have continued to work hard throughout the year, often in difficult or even dangerous conditions, for all of us. They deserve all the thanks we can give them, and this is my small contribution to those.

The story is set during the 14th century pandemic, later known as the Black Death, which raged across the Middle East and Europe from 1347 to 1350, killing about 40% of the population. Although our Covid-19 pandemic has not been as bad as that in terms of death rate – indeed, even the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918/1919 killed far more people – there have been a surprising number of parallels between the 14th century pandemic and our own. Pandemics in history have tended to run unchecked, mainly because medicine had no answer to them, but they often exhausted themselves and eventually fizzled out, leaving society reeling.  In our case we have the blessing of vaccines on the horizon, but we need to remember that there are no guarantees that their immunity will last, or that the virus won’t mutate to outflank them. The episode has been a salutary reminder – and perhaps we needed one – that humanity is not in control of history, something of which the 14th century inhabitants of the Earth were only too well aware!

The Black Death continued to plague Europe for three centuries, with the outbreaks gradually becoming smaller and more localised, only coming to an end in 1665. The consequent fall in population was not made up until the 18th century, but the economy bounced back fairly quickly and headed in new directions, while the social changes that happened as a result laid the foundations for the modern world. I suspect that when the history of 2020 is written in years to come, it too will be seen as a watershed for new social and economic, and possibly religious and political, developments as yet unforeseen.

In the next blog I will look at the way the Black Death came to the United Kingdom, and how the authorities and ordinary people reacted to it.

Covid-19 and the Black Death

The corona virus Covid-19 is a strange phenomenon. On the one hand, it has caused the global shut-down of much that makes the modern world function, both socially and economically – theatres, restaurants and cafes, leisure venues, workplaces and now schools, bringing the world into ‘uncharted territory’ and forcing us to live in unfamiliar ways which may make us re-think our modes of work and travel quite radically. On the other, it is an infection with two very different outcomes, depending on who contracts it, combined with a very rapid infection rate and a relatively long asymptomatic incubation period during which the disease can be transmitted to others. Because it is a virus, and an unknown one at that, there is no simple cure – antibiotics (and antibacterials, please note) do not work against viruses. It seems that most people under 70, unless they have underlying health issues (there is an official list of 10, including diabetes and asthma, which are suffered by many of the under-70s), will experience quite mild symptoms which clear up after a week or so – unpleasant, perhaps, but not in any way life-threatening. If we only had to deal with those, there would have been no problem. But the vulnerable, the elderly and those with specific health issues, can be affected very severely, with some needing hospital treatment at the level of intensive care, and some do not survive. It is for the sake of these people, the severity of whose illness will overwhelm the NHS if the epidemic is left unchecked, that the government has taken such radical measures. And I do not disagree with them.

However, we must keep a sense of perspective. For one thing, many vulnerable patients, particularly among the elderly, do not survive a bout of influenza, which is why these folk are invited to have a ‘flu jab every autumn. Once we have a vaccination for Covid-19, we should be able to downgrade its significance to that of influenza, though I doubt we shall get rid of it altogether. This is a temporary shut-down of normal life, to slow the rate of infection and allow us to weather the storm. It is like putting up the flood defences before the river breaks its banks, or reefing the ship before the severe gale hits you. When the storm has passed, it is possible to return to ‘normal’ life, though you may have learned valuable lessons from the losses sustained. For another, this is not the worst epidemic the world has suffered. Many people are looking back to the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920, which killed millions across Europe in particular. But we could also look back further, and consider the Black Death.

It just so happens that (quite by coincidence) I am in the later stages of writing a novel set against the background of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. It has been a rather strange experience, writing this as the Covid-19 death rate mounts, and as the crisis hits various countries. You can almost feel the fear, not only of the disease itself (which as I have said, only a relatively few actually need to fear) but also of the disruption and the uncertainty, particularly economic uncertainty, that it has brought. However, this all fades into insignificance if you look at the Black Death scenario.

When the Black Death (not called this until the eighteenth century – contemporaries referred to ‘the Great Mortality’ and ‘the Pestilence’) arrived in Europe from Asia, where it was endemic, in 1347, nothing like it had been seen since a previous epidemic of the same disease in the sixth century. It arrived first in southern Europe, then raced across Italy and France to arrive in southern and western England in the summer of 1348. It spread across the British Isles and the rest of northern Europe through 1349 and 1350, finally petering out. It seems to have consisted of two or perhaps three forms of bubonic plague – the classic type with the growths (buboes) which killed 60% of those who caught it, a chest version (pneumonic plague) which attacked the lungs, and which had a near-100% death rate, and the rare septicaemic plague which killed people so fast that many never knew they actually had the disease but collapsed and died within hours of contracting it. The disease bore most heavily on the young and children, and up to half the entire population died in the two years that the plague raged across the continent – imagine the effect of this on the economy and society in general. Compare these statistics with a consistent death rate of 1 in 30 (less than 4%) of confirmed Covid-19 cases, where unconfirmed mild cases almost certainly outnumber the confirmed ones, especially in the UK where no attempt has been made to confirm the illness in many of the self-isolating individuals who have identified the symptoms in themselves. A fair number of these will not even contact the 111 service, except possibly via the internet, but will simply wait to recover and then return to work.

Add to this comparison the fact that in 1347–1350 no one knew what caused the illness or how to combat it (not even washing their hands!), there was no medical science as such to advise governments, no mathematical models to guide, no ways of treating even the symptoms or improving people’s chance of survival. The Paris medical faculty, who informed the physicians of the day, put it down to ‘miasma’ – bad atmosphere – and an unfortunate conjunction of planets in 1345. Most people couldn’t afford the services of a doctor, but even if they could, it made little difference to the outcome. Even the herbalists, who offered pharmaceutical aid to the poor and rich alike, had no answers. Only flight gave any chance of avoiding the disease, and even then it was quite common for those who fled to take the contagion with them to the unfortunate place they chose as refuge.  I think you can see that really by comparison Covid-19 is not the terror that some might think.

The fourteenth century had no broadcast media and no printed press, which may perhaps have been helpful. Rumour is certainly bad, but continued focus on a problem such as we have at the moment in the news media is possibly worse and is increasing the public fear of Covid-19 as a ‘killer virus’. As the American president F.D. Roosevelt famously said in another context: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Fear dampens the immune system, thus causing the body to fight the virus less effectively, so even in a physical sense, never mind a psychological or social one, it is to be resisted. All this will pass.

The extraordinary thing that, in Black Death England at least, where many of the best historical records survive for the fourteenth century, what you might call the Spirit of the Blitz made perhaps its first appearance. People helped each other– not universally, perhaps, but in significant numbers – in spite of the risks to themselves. Priests went about their duties to their parishioners and many died as a result of taking the infection from them (it is on the records of new appointments to benefices that most estimates of the death toll depend). Government went on, and local administration went on too. Rents and fees were paid if possible, and rebates were asked for (and generally granted) where necessary. Manorial and town records were kept up to date by a succession of officials. We Carried On. So we can now as well.

I’m glad to see that the Anglican Church, though sensibly cancelling gatherings for worship, is keeping its church buildings open for private prayer. The atmosphere within them is often saturated with centuries of prayer and worship, giving it a numinous quality that many will find helpful in these difficult and stressful days. I applaud this move, and hope that the church authorities will make sure this continues. Although many have rejected faith, yet in extremis some will find faith offers something that atheism, agnosticism and materialism does not. I know I do.