Black Death - Simon Schama History of Britain

A first in the annals of biological warfare. Once it arrived by sea in Italy, it spread quickly into mainland Europe. There had been devastating calamities before visited on Britain. Countless numbers died in the apocalyptic famine of 1315. But it was the merciless indiscriminate swiftness of the plague's progress which so unhinged the cities and villages caught in its onslaught. No one rich or poor could escape. This is how the Welsh poet yuan geffen saw it, waiting for his own infection which sure enough came in 1349. We see death coming into our midst like foul smoke. A plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion. Great is its seething like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy color. It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste. They are like a shower of peas, the early ornaments of Black Death. 

It would take about 6 days from the bite of an infected flea for the tell tale swellings, the buboes, to appear on the victim's neck, groin, or armpits. Accompanied by violent fever and agonizing pain. The immune system would be overwhelmed within a week. If the infection reached the lungs, death came after just a couple of days of bloody coughing. Anyone who inhaled even the tiniest droplets of mucus would be doomed to suffer in their turn. No one would have known it at the time, but the tightly packed streets alleys and houses of a place like Bristol made a perfect factory farm for the bacillus. Vermin crawling with fleas lived alongside the crowded population of people and animals. The nibble of a flea was a common irritation in this lousy ant heaped world. And even when the bubes appeared, there was no reason to suppose that fleas or rats were responsible. But there was no doubt about what would happen next. 

The youngest and the oldest and the poorest, those with least resistance would be taken first. But then everyone else, too. In the town this right for infection, almost half the population would have perished in the first year. Among them, 15 of Bristol's 52 city councillors, their names struck through as they died. Terrified and bewildered, the healthy abandoned the sick so their fate. Whole towns, villages, even families were cruelly divided into the living, and the dying. Husbands would have shunned their wives, fathers and mothers recoiled from contact with their children. It's almost impossible to imagine the utter desolation and terror. The complete collapse of everything you've taken for granted. How do you find bread now the bakers are all dead? How do you find a physic now that none of them work? And at last, how do you find someone to cut away the bodies that have to be disposed of? Somewhere. 

The bigger the city, the greater the shark. In 1348, London had a population of close to a 100,000. In the first wave of the plague, 300 died every day. At spitalfields, there had long been a medieval hospital with the cemetery attached. Within its walls, the dead were dutifully laid to rest in their individual graves, pointing east so that come the day of judgment they would rise again facing towards Jerusalem. But in the grip of the epidemic, there was no time for such careful pieties. Recent excavations have turned up mass pits where the bodies were pitchforked into the dirt in obvious haste and desperation. Unearth now just the way they were dumped in, they look as if they're protesting at the indignity. By the summer of 1349, the plague could spread to the furthest corners of England Wales and Scotland. Now, it traveled across the sea to Ireland. According to John clan, a Franciscan friar writing at kilkenny, 14,000 had perished in Dublin alone. Since the beginning of the world it has been unheard of for so many people to die in such a short time. This pestilence was so contagious that those who touch the dead are the sick or immediately infected themselves.

I, seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil. Waiting among the dead for death to come have committed to writing what I truly have heard and examined. And I leave parchment for continuing this work if perchance any man survive. And Annie of the race of Adam escaped this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun. At this point, another hand has written. Here it seems the author died. When the survivors recovered from the first brutal shark of the Black Death, they asked inevitably why us. Why now? The best guess was that the plague was caused by a corruption of the atmosphere, putrefaction, the mark of men and beasts rising from lakes, swamps, and chasms. This dank smog even had a name, miasma. If sickness grew in stench, then sweet smells were an obvious remedy. Physicians and herbalists lost no time in devising recipes for pomanders and potions, to guard against infection, or even to act as an antidote for the stricken. 5 cups of rue if it be a man, and if it be a woman, leave out the room. 5 little blades of Columbine, a great quantity of marigold flowers, an egg that is newly laid and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within. 

And lay it to the fire and roast it till ground to powder but do not burn it. And brew all these herbs with good ale but do not strain them and make the sick, drink it for three evenings and mornings. If they hold it in their stomach, they shall have life. But if God decided otherwise, all the potions in the world would be of no avail. The inescapable conclusion was that the pestilence had been laid on mankind as a chastisement for its manifold sins. Lewd necklines, lascivious dancing and shameless adultery had brought on the plague. It would end when the world was contrite, but it never seemed contrite enough. In the meantime, the country was laid waste. Farms were abandoned, whole villages deserted. The accounts for the bishop of Winchester's lands at farnham and sarre, told the story of a rural society in shock. In the first year of the Black Death, 52 households, a good third of the villagers were wiped out. 

Given the Mark, defect us pair pestilent. The farnham rolls put names to the numbers, names like Matilda sticker, she died together with her entire family. Or a servant girl, Matilda talvin, who saw her master and his entire household succumbed to the plague. By the time it ebbed away in 1350, 1300 had died in fauna. While the plague took, it could also give in the first year of the Black Death, John croucher, who was a minor, became an orphan, but an orphan with assets because he could now inherit the lots left to him by his father and another relative. This must have been the making of a small but serious village fortune. In another place in the roles, we learned that the harvest had become twice as expensive to gather in. 12 pence written in Roman numerals per acre because role say of the plague and the scarcity of labor, workers it seems were thin on the ground and were beginning to charge accordingly. 

Farnum story could be repeated all through Britain. The countryside after the Black Death was an irreversibly altered world. For one thing, there were no more serfs. For centuries, being a serf meant being tied by custom and by birth to your local lord. He gave you a tiny spot of land of which you could farm. And in return, you put in hours of grinding toil unpaid on his very big farm. There were other ways too in which you were not at all free. You had to ask his permission to marry, and you were not repeat not ever to leave. Until that is the Black Death. Now there was a desperate labor shortage and the simple operation of the laws of supply and demand meant that for the first time you could actually set the terms of the deal. He wanted some labor out of you. Well, then you could say, why not start by paying me something? He wants you to move into a piece of lamb, which otherwise would go to rack and ruin. You respond by saying, okay, cut the rent. And if the law then says not a chance you impertinent so and say, well, then you just up sticks and find someone else who's got a more secure grip on the new economic facts of life. Well, hundreds of thousands of peasants must have done just that. 

And there was nothing anybody could do about it. It was not just the social order that the plague shook loose it also ate away at the sense of security offered by the church. Especially since the regular clergy seemed powerless to provide help for the afflicted. Or even for themselves. In 1349, the bishop of bath and wells, seeing that there was a serious shortage of priests, authorized laymen to hear the confession of the dying. Or he wrote, even a woman, if no man is available. The most daring took matters into their own hands, seeking redemption, directly from the scriptures. The lollards took their name from their mouthing out loud of the Bible, and encouraged others to do the same by translating it into English. Liberating it from the obscurity of Latin. As few as they were, the lollards were a dramatic threat to the authority of the church. They were only saved from persecution by the protection of their most powerful patron, King Edward's third son, John of gaunt, the duke of Lancaster. Men like him were drawn to new forms of piety and penance because the plague had made them acutely aware that king death was no respecter of rank or wealth. And that should he strike without warning they had better be ready for a reckoning. 

They all knew the cautionary tale of the three living and the three dead. A trio of handsome young kings, out for a decent day's sport, suddenly find themselves confronted by three not so handsome cadavers. Each, in a different state of decomposition, the Marx brothers, from hell. The three living pipe up, I'm afraid low what I see and me thinks these Devils be. Back come the other three. Such shall you be? I was welfare, and for God's love, beware. The further scone are the gruesome threesome that makes a little speech. Now that I was head of my tribe, princes, kings and nobles, royal and rich, rejoicing and wealth, but now I am so hideous and bare that even the worms disdain me. This was an invasion that plantagenet England had not prepared for. The invasion of the space of the living by the dead. The sense that the borders between backyards and boneyards are collapsed, produced a sudden nervousness. In the face of king death, neither riches nor earthly fame could buy Salvation. Or guarantee immortality.