Great Dying: the Black Death of 1348

Called the Great Dying, the Great Mortality or the Pestilence at the time, the Black Death (a 17th century term) decimated 40-60% of England's population.  Occurring during the reign of Edward III, this pestilence would cause a drastic change in English society.

Prior to the pestilence, serfdom was rigidly enforced, with severe penalties for anyone caught trying to leave the manor where they were born and would die.  Even for peasants or common people who were not serfs, getting a better life for oneself or one's family was rare.  Sons followed their fathers on the land or in a trade, and passed it along to their sons in turn.  Although sanitation and hygiene in the Middle Ages is likely exaggerated, reports of how bad it was aren't far wrong.  Without modern pesticides and pest control, rats, fleas and other vermin infested streets, homes, clothes and containers of various sorts.  Unbeknownst to humans, the rats carried a bacteria, Yersinia Pestas, that was transmitted to humans via infected fleas.  Since rats and fleas could stow away on animals, wagons, bags and crates, and eventually on ships, the plague spread from China along the trade routes and into Europe.

It first hit the Plantagenet domains of Gascony in 1348.  A seaman traveling from Gascony arrived in Weymouth in June, 1348.  Unknown to him, he was patient one.  By the fall of 1348, plague had spread to London.  It was country-wide by summer, 1349, before dying out in December.  Unlike many other areas in Europe, Edward's government attempted to respond in an organized manner.  In larger cities, provisions were made to carry away and bury the dead.  Understanding of contagion and public health was limited at the time, but not nonexistent.  People were aware that sick persons could spread the disease.  What they didn't understand was that, by the time the sick were quarantined, they had already spread the disease to others.  Church records of the period record parishioner after parishioner dead of pestilence.   Smaller towns and villages were almost empty.  Agricultural activity slowed down and there was a lull in the fighting of the Hundred Years War.

Medical care was primitive, including sweating, bloodletting, purgatives and emetics.  There was some idea that breaking open the swellings and draining the pus might save the patient, but debate on when and how to do this was widespread and many patients still died despite whatever care was available.  There was no strata of society immune from the disease.  Lords and peasants, merchants and farmers, clergy and others all died.   Edward III wrote to his colleague Alfonso of Castile that "destructive Death....has snatch from both of us our dearest daughter, whom we loved best of all, as her virtues demanded."  Meanwhile, many struggled to understand why this disease was occurring, believing it to be the scourge of God.

With villages empty and few laborers available to work the land, peasants were emboldened to leave the farms and fields outright and head to the cities, or to seek land where conditions might be better.  Edward's government tried to prevent this with a series of ordinances, but the peasants either paid no heed or would revolt outright in the Peasants' War of 1381.  It was now possible for someone to leave the manor where they and their parents and grandparents had been born, seek work in a city and begin to build a life other than that of a common laborer.  Another benefit was the number of charitable endowments, especially to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, on behalf of people seeking to placate God's wrath.  While Europe following the plague descended into hysteria and obsession with the self-flagellation and other forms of penance, the English were busy rebuilding their lives.