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28 pages 56 minutes read

Philip Ziegler

The Black Death

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1969

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Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Arrival in England: the West Country”

In 1348, England enjoyed remarkable economic and political stability. Just over 10% of the country’s citizens inhabited urban locations—the largest cities were London, Norwich, and York. The rest lived in small villages of under a few hundred residents. When the plague reached England through the southern ports, northern England remained unaffected until 1349.

Based on information from ecclesiastical and civil records, the plague ravaged the southern half of the country to such an extent that the Catholic Church itself failed to operate normally. Hundreds of parishes were left without clergy or the means to administer sacraments or religious rites. On the whole, the priesthood suffered greater casualties than the average due to their increased contact with the sick and dying, as well as the fact that they were (on average) older than the median age of the population.

One of the side effects of the plague was apathy in the wake of mass death. Those who survived would often become morally indifferent to their communities, which led to resentment and suspicion of other members of society. The “psychological shock” (101) experienced by the typical medieval person cannot be overestimated. Doctors proved useless, the Church seemed powerless, the rich abandoned their communities, and leaders abandoned their posts. The Black Death spared nobody.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Progress Across the South”

From the southern portions of England, the plague spread east. Reports indicate that it went from Bristol “into Oxfordshire” and eventually up into “Surrey towards London” (107). Oxford University was closed and most of the students and faculty either abandoned the school or remained and died. However, it is clear that the plague had completely different effects on various locations in England. Some villages recovered almost completely within three or four years, others suffered in recovery for the better part of a century, and some were completely wiped out altogether. The plague struck the diocese of Winchester “with especial violence” (113), with the dioceses of Exeter and Norwich following closely behind; by 1349, existing graveyards in Winchester could no longer hold the dead.

Chapter 9 Summary: “London: Hygiene and the Medieval City”

The most significant city in England was no doubt London, which at the time was the home to about “sixty thousand” inhabitants (118). The daily routine of the typical Londoner no doubt led to the remarkable spread of the plague within city walls. Overcrowding was likely the most significant transmission culprit, followed by the fact that the plague would more easily strike and kill those who were already weak from poor living conditions, contaminated water, and overall conditions of filth.

Sanitary equipment at the time was poor and largely unavailable, and toilets and sewers of the most primitive quality. While the city council did its best with its limited resources, and while London was relatively clean for its size and era, the Black Death simply proved to be too much for the city to deal with; London was overrun very quickly, losing between a third and one half of its population, rich and poor alike. While the sudden drop in mouths to feed prevented a famine, food was still scarce. As Londoners fled into the countryside to find food, they carried the plague with them. While London recovered relatively quickly given its population and economic prosperity, its moral reputation was damaged, newly considered to be a hotbed of degeneracy and wickedness.

Chapter 10 Summary: “Sussex, Kent and East Anglia”

In Kent, the Bishop of Rochester recorded deaths so overwhelming that there weren’t enough people to remove the dead bodies; eventually, mass graves and trenches had to be dug into which bodies were unceremoniously dumped. Kent was abandoned to such an extent that farmlands lay idle and empty. In Canterbury, the plague did not entrench itself as deeply. Pilgrims continued to come to the convent of Christ Church, either in thanksgiving for surviving the ordeal, or in hopes of offering sacrifice and prayer to avoid it. Only once the plague passed over the region could the populace return to agriculture.

In East Anglia, certain towns and villages simply disappeared and never recovered. Its death rate was far higher than in most other parts of the nation. Norwich, the second largest city in the country, lost more than half of its population and never again reached the same heights it had enjoyed at the start of the century. As far as clergy went, “nearly two thousand five hundred” (137) died of the plague, decimating the Church and preventing bishops from growing their respective parishes and dioceses with anything near their previous capacity.

Chapter 11 Summary: “The Midlands and the North of England”

“The Black Death splattered the central part of England with the same haphazard venom as it had shown in the south” (138). The plague ravaged the countryside, killing man and beast alike, and the lack of workers was so pervasive that a lot of food simply rotted in the fields for lack of anyone to harvest it. Once the plague had passed through, however, the countryside was relatively quick to recover. For example, the prosperous town of Leicester, a center of agriculture and trade, was able to attract people of all economic classes with optimistic prospects; for years after the plague, the socioeconomic mobility of the average medieval person rose.

All hope that England would be spared and denial that the plague could cross over into the island ended when the Black Death reached English shores. Even northerners could only wait with dutiful resignation until their family and friends fell around them. Yorkshire deaths, for example, proportionately paralleled surrounding areas, seeing just shy of 50% of the local clergy die. Archbishop Hugh of Damascus was a particularly brave soul, roaming the countryside visiting the sick and consecrating new churchyards for the sake of burial rites. As elsewhere, the local government survived only through great strain and trial.

Chapter 12 Summary: “The Welsh Borders, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland”

The plague entered Wales and the northern lands “through the border counties of Hereford, Shropshire, and Cheshire” (154). While the government largely survived intact, local communities largely took matters of law and order into their own hands during the height of the epidemic. Wales and Ireland seem not to have suffered more seriously than the rest of England, but “little is known about the Black Death in Wales” (156) and Ireland, which was likely infected within just a few months of England.

Before the plague came to Scotland, that country delighted in the suffering of its English neighbors. The Scottish population endured lighter levels of destruction than the south. Estimates among Scottish sources put the death toll at only one third of the population. Most estimates from that time tend to exaggerate these counts, so Scotland’s actual death toll might have been even lower. By the end of 1350, “all Britain had been infected” (161), and those who were left to pick up the pieces suffered mentally perhaps more than they had suffered physically.

Chapters 7-12 Analysis

Before the Black Death, England was enjoying a period of relative peace and prosperity that surpassed the majority of developed European countries. Paradoxically, this made it in some ways more susceptible to the plague’s devastation. England’s reliance on trade meant that its southern ports were teeming with ships from abroad—ships carrying the plague, which penetrated into northern England within a year. The economically flourishing large cities London and Norwich had ideal conditions for disease transmission: overcrowding, close living quarters, a lack of public health standards, rudimentary and inadequate sanitary equipment, and a population already sick and weak from their daily manner of life. The only upshot was that the sudden drop in the number of mouths to feed meant that those left behind would not starve to death.

The Black Death did not only exact a physical toll, however, but also left traumatic devastation in its path for those who survived. While the dead were left to be buried in mass graves, the survivors dealt with post-traumatic stress, survivor’s guilt, and the burden of rebuilding a broken society. In addition, two years of utter devastation and rampant death left the average person in a stupor of apathy and nihilistic cynicism. How could there be any meaning to life when something so horrid and unavoidable could simply sweep through a village and drag a third to a half of the local population into the grave?

Bringing the death toll up in almost every instance was the rate of death among the Christian clergy, whose ranks saw an almost uniform mortality rate of 50%. Some of this was no doubt due to the fact that the average cleric was typically older, but we can attribute much of the higher mortality rate to the fact that the clergy were far more likely to spend extended time with the infected: Their work required them to be at the bedside of the dying to provide the sacraments and hear confessions.

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