The plagues of Britain: the Black Death

The Black Death has the dubious distinction of being in all likelihood the worst disaster in British history. Probably a lethal cocktail of bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic plague (though not all historians agree), it carried off perhaps a third of the population after coming to England from the East in 1348.

Spread by fleas carried on the black rat, and perhaps originating in Central Asia, it was first noticed in the West Country, and may have arrived at Melcombe Regis, now effectively part of Weymouth. Across the country, so many priests died that there were not enough to hear people’s final confessions, so the church said people about to die could unburden themselves to a lay person, and in extremis, ‘even to a woman’.

One of the consequences of the appalling mortality was a dramatic decline in respect for authority – particularly that of the church. The clergy often banged on about how the plague was God’s punishment for people’s bad behaviour, but the line did not go down very well, and at Yeovil, for example, the local bishop found himself besieged in his church by an angry crowd armed with bows and arrows.

London was by far the biggest city in the country, and there, as in other places, the numbers of dead overwhelmed the authorities, and many bodies were just shovelled into mass graves. Food supplies started to dry up as carters refused to come to the city, and Londoners had to go out into the countryside to search for supplies. This lack of social distancing helped spread the pestilence.

For more, see my book A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press).

Return of the Black Death

Reports today that the “Black Death” – bubonic plague – has broken out in a training camp for al-Qaeda insurgents in Algeria. The disease, which swept through Europe and Asia starting in the early 1330’s, was perhaps the biggest disaster in human history, wiping out around a third of the population in the areas it attacked. It reached Britain in the summer of 1348, allegedly first appearing at Melcombe Regis in Dorset.

With death rates at this level, it is hardly surprising that many people thought they were witnessing the end of the world. A dying Irish monk compiled an account of the epidemic, saying he had written it just in case “any man survive.” Nowadays some scientists question whether the Black Death was actually bubonic plague, and argue it may have been some other viral infection.

Whatever the truth of that, the plague lives on. In 2006, an outbreak claimed at least 50 lives in the chaos of the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and there are fears it may soon appear in Zimbabwe.