In 1348 the Black Death swept relentlessly across Europe, leaving perphaps 25 million dead. Two years later the ordeal appeared to be over, but outbreaks of the plague were to become a recurrent nightmare. The contemporary French historian Jean de Venerte wrote: ‘In AD 1348, in addition to Famine and War, Plague appeared in the world’. In fact, rumours had been current in European ports for more than 10 years of something terrible already happening in distant lands, of India depopulated and Syria and Armenia covered with dead bodies. Then three galleys put into the north Italian port of Genoa, their sailors infected by bites from fleas borne by the ships rats. Though the sailors were driven back to sea by flaming arrows,’for no man dared touch them’, it was too late. The Black Death had arrived, the most virulent epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague ever recorded. In the next two years it was to kill between a third and a half of the population of Europe, perhaps as many as 25 million people

A QUICK DEATH

Death came quickly. The writer Boccaccio witnessed the plague in Florence.’It first betrayed itself by the emergence of certaintumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg,’he wrote. He believed that after the tumours, or ‘buboes’, appeared the infected person would be dead within a day, though others noted that victims usually lingered on for four or five days. The term ‘bubonic plague’ derives from these tumours; the description ‘Black Death’ from the colour that they turned. The disease leapt rapidly across countries; it was in France, Spain and England by the end of 1348. Most unsettling of all was the fact that people at the time did not understand how the infection was spread. The pope’s doctor at Avignon, Guy de Chauliac, a remarkable man with more insight into the epidemic than any person then living, declared that you could catch the disease ‘simply by looking at sick people’. A doctor in Paris wrote that ‘one sick person could infect the whole world. Two plagues made up the Black Death. At the time only de Chauliac noticed that, in addition to the buboes, there was another quite distinct set of symptoms; continual fever and coughing of blood. Though he did not realise it, he had identified the far more infectious pneumonic plague, from which, as he noted, a victim died in two days. The bubonic type was spread by the fleas of the black rat; the pneumonic by a person coughing into the air. In an epidemic in Manchuria as recently as 1921, the life expectancy of those who caught pnuemonic plague was less than two days.

After two ghastly years during which there seemed no hope, 1348 and 1349, the nightmare seemed to pass as suddenly as it had arrived. In 1350 Pope Clement V announced a jubilee year, and a million pilgrims flocked to Rome to celebrate the survival of humanity. They were all terribly mistaken. Ten years later the pestilence returned, then again in 1369. Even 1348 was not the beginning, for the plague had come before. Writing in the 8th century, the English historian Bede recorded that in the 5th century, around 450,’the living could bearly bury the dead’. A great mystery of the British past is how no more than 10,000 immigrant Anglo-Saxons came to conquer a country with a population which may have numbered between 5 and 10 million. The plague might offer an explanation. Soon after the epidemic struck, the English, who had been held up in their advance for half a century – a check associated with King Arthur – resumed the process which ended with their conquest. It is thought that the English invaders had not been affected by the plague for, unlike the British, they did not trade with Mediterranean Europe. Empty bottles found buried under British hill-forts show that wine trade was flourishing, and it is possible that with the wine trade came the plague. No one wrote an eye-witness account, but many did when the disease returned. In AD 543, during the rule of Emperor Justinian, plague swept through the Eastern Roman Empire, and a year later, as a boy, the Frankish historian Gregory of Tours saw it pass through Gaul. In 550 in Ireland the annalists recorded that the ‘yellow plague’ had come. There is a glimpse of the terror people must have felt in the accounts of the death of the Welsh king Maelgwn the Tall, who had left his hill-top fortress near modern Llandudno to take refuge in the church at Rhos, which exists on its slopes to this day. The king is said to have put his eye to the keyhole and seen ‘the yellow plague loping towards him’.

In 1382, a generation after the Black Death, the plague returned. The Welsh poet Iolo Goch, Iolo the Red, wrote an elergy on one of its victims, his patron the archdeacon of St Asaph. Such poems were a stock in trade for any medieval Welsh poet, but this elergy is different, for the writer has been terrified out of all conventional phrases. His imagery is filled with horror. This is no death in old age or in battle; this is a death the poet cannot understand. ‘On Thursday the horror began/between the new days and the night…’ Out of nowhere the plague had come again, as it was to do every 4 to 12 years until the 16th century. The last major incidence of the plague in Britain was the Great Plague of London in 1665. Remarkably, for the most part it was confined to the metropolis. In 1910 there was a small outbreak in Suffolk, but in the East it rampaged on, claiming 6 million victims in India as recently as 1896. A myth about the Black Death is that it was and remains the most infectious disease ever known. The windows in some old houses in East Anglia are bricked where up where they face towards London. But the Black Death can now be completely cured by tetracycline, the simplest and cheapest form of antibiotic, discovered in the 1940s. The most extensive use of this drug in the West is for acne. Not everyone who was infected by bubonic plague died. Well over 60 per cent of those infected did lose their lives, but excavation of a plague cemetery under the Royal Mint in London shows that the epidemic of 1665 may have killed fewer people than was once believed. The population of the city is estimated to have been between 40,000 and 100,000, but bodies found suggest a death toll of no more than 12,400. Moreover, the methodical layout of the cemetaries implies an orderly public health administration.

THE SERFS FIGHT BACK

At the time the Black Death seemed the most terrible event in the history of the world. But for one group in society it provided the chance to realise their power. In this new age when labour became a problem, those who worked for wages demanded more. In 1349, in the middle of the epidemic, the tanners of Amiens called for a rise in pay. Some serfs insisted on paying rent and so freed themselves from their obligations to their masters, while others just slipped away from the land. The Statute of Labourers, enacted by the English Parliment in 1351, attempted to force wages down to pre-plague levels. A poll tax was introduced, riots ensued, and in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1351 workers demanded an end to serfdom. Though these rebellions were ruthlessly put down, there could be no going back