After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Black Death: Inside Medieval Lockdown

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Around 50% of everyone in Europe died during the Black Death. It's very hard to make sense of that. What did it look and feel like to live through this calamity?Today Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by historian Helen Carr whose new book Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century is out in May.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. 1348. Florence.

Your footsteps echo down paved streets across broad squares, tall buildings tower over you, grand columns and vaulted arches, turrets and coats of arms. This is one of the largest and most powerful cities in Europe, a place usually buzzing with endless commerce. But this is 1348, the year of the Black Death in Florence, and the air is filled with the stench of death. Ahead of you, you see two men dragging a corpse behind them, trying to keep up with a priest. A dead body is given the same respect given to an animal carcass these days. You catch the eyes of people as they pass. Some are full of fear, but most are like yours. Exhausted beyond belief, almost beyond caring.

exhausted beyond belief, almost beyond caring. Hollow laughter rings out from one house, music from another window, moans from another, a worker slouches past wearing finely embroidered clothes that fit poorly, doubtless stolen from a house emptied by disease, but who can blame them? Everyone is surviving this as best they can. A group who have thrown care to the wind go roaring past you now, drunk on wine and cheering each other forward to the next inn or to oblivion, whichever comes first. The sun is shining, and not far off, sitting on a front step as if to enjoy the warmth of a pleasant

day, is the body of one of the dead, dragged there by its neighbours when they notice the smell, buboes bulging under its neck. It's not alone. Corpses are here, there and everywhere now. It is as if the end of the world has come. How are we to behave? How should we feel? What was it to live through the Black Death? Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie.

And I'm Anthony. Now last week we looked at an origin story, not the origin story but just one of many, of how the Black Death entered Europe and our guest for that episode was Dr Hanna Barker. So if you haven't listened to that episode, go back, check it out, arm yourself for what's coming next. Now, there's a statistic that you hear bandied around rather a lot when it comes to the Black Death. That is that somewhere around half of the European population died of this disease. Now, it's really, really, really hard to get your head around that statistic, to get to the human experience at the heart of it. And today we're going to try and answer that question.

We're going to see what it was like to live through the Black Death and hopefully to survive it. We are going to be heading to 14th century Italy, one of the first and worst hit countries in Europe. And here to help us tell that story today is the one, the only Helen Carr, medieval historian extraordinaire whose new book, Septid Isle, A History of the 14th Century is out in May. When I tell you I'm excited for this book, you cannot imagine we are recording remotely today and Helen is in the history offices and she's brought a copy of the book for me and Anthony and I have never wished she's waving at it on the screen. I literally have no wish so much to be able to reach through the computer screen and grab it. Helen, oh, I'm gushing. Welcome to After Dark.

Thank you for having me. That's a very nice pricey, isn't it? I like that history hit let you in the building, but not us today. Yeah, we're not allowed in. We're just like, no, banished you two, go to your little offices wherever you are, we'll bring Helen into the office. Listen, I want to ask you a question before we get started. You have just written a new history of the 14th century. This is a complete history.

You have covered in that, I know, parts of the Black Death. Why do you think it's important in the context of this century that we have a pretty good understanding of the Black Death and its consequences and its impact? Emma McAllister That's a really good question. The Black Death for me was one of the leading points as to wanting to write about this whole century because it really presents a sort of nadir in the book. It is literally the middle of the century. It's 1348 that it starts to arrive in England, 1349. It is the pinnacle of the century and then everything changes afterwards. The demographic changes, society changes. There are shifts in social hierarchy. There are shifts going forward in how people consider death. There are shifts also in

how people consider what it is to be English. It's a huge, huge part of people's existence and it shaped the rest of the Black Death and give us a little bit of an overview of the period and then we're going to ask Helen how he's done. Sorry in advance, Anthony. AC Look, as Helen was saying, we're situating ourselves more or less in the centre of the 14th century and we see that in the case of the Black Death, it's arriving in European ports specifically, bear that in mind, European ports, Venice, it's arriving in European ports, specifically bear that

in mind, European ports, Venice, Genoa, Marseille, in around 1347, as we've heard from Dr. Hanna Barker in a previous episode. Then we are seeing that by 1351 it's reached almost every corner of Europe. So this is a pretty rapid and devastating spread because if you think about it, Europe's population at the outbreak of the plague was about 75 to 80 million, it's been estimated. But by the time it's run its course in this particular outbreak in 51, we're looking at it having reduced by 30 to 60% within a few years, most likely closer to the 60% as far as we know. Now we're going to be talking a lot about the Italian context today. Just to give you a little bit of an insight, Italy is not a unified country at this time. It's a collection of territories and city-states.

So when we're talking about these individual places, such as Florence, just keep that in mind as we go through. Back in England, as Helen can tell much better than I can, Edward III is on the throne and the Hundred Years' War is in progress. Actually Helen, just as a backdrop to this plague in terms of the English backdrop, and I know we're going to be concentrating mostly on Italy or the Italian states, how important do you think that the Hundred Years War is in terms of the backdrop to this as well? Just to put that, like we're talking about a huge plague and a huge war coming together.

It doesn't sound like a great melting pot. Well it's a giant pain in the ass Fred of the Third because he's just won the Battle of Cressy and he's doing really well and he's on his ascendant. And then guess what? The Black Death comes and one minute he's celebrating his establishment of the Order of Vigarta and dressing as a pheasant. And then the next minute, he's having to deal with a country that 50% of his population are dying. So it becomes this huge administrative error. It puts a complete pause on the war entirely. He has to shut down all of the ports and there's no pilgrimage. Nobody is allowed to leave or come in. It's a real problem. He's got to think about hygiene. He's got to think about actually how to look

after people in the cities and try and keep people alive. And on a personal level, he just does what every wealthy nobleman does and goes to his house in the cities and try and keep people alive. And on a personal level, he just does what every wealthy nobleman does and goes to his house in the country. Naturally. Now, Helen, you set out so much there how the Black Death interacts with all these other events in history and indeed how it changes the course of history in the 14th century and in the centuries to follow. But let's go down to that human personal level that you're talking about there with Edward. And aside from the experience of any rich nobleman with a country estate to escape to, what was the experience of the ordinary, say medieval peasant going through the Black Death? What symptoms

would they be looking out for? What was life and death like in this moment? Well, the Black Death spared nobody, but I think it's unfair to say that the peasants got off just as everyone else did because they didn't. They were certainly the worst hit because they were living in more cramped conditions. They were living in closer quarters. They were often living in small villages, hamlets, but also within the city. They were squashed together. You can still see remnants of how medieval houses used to look and they're kind of coming in at the top of each other. There's filth running down the streets. There's fleas in your houses. You're sharing beds with multiple people in your household.

Disease is going to spread faster in those sorts of environments. So of the social classes in England and across Europe, it was the peasant class that suffered the worst. That's why after the first wave, one of the major social changes is the serf class, the serfdom class, which were effectively a slave class in England particularly. It ceased to exist because people no longer were bound by this sort of fatalistic sense of their existence. They weren't born as a surf and therefore they had to live as a surf. If they survived the Black Death, they suddenly were worth something. They could work land. They knew how to plough. They were valuable

people and they'd started to demand a wage and therefore escaped that sort of pre-constructed social sphere. Well, let's abandon England for a minute and talk about sunnier climes. Mind you, today is a lovely sunny day in London, so who knows. But I want to take us to Florence for a moment because one of the most famous accounts of the Black Death comes to us from Florence and is written by Giovanni Boccaccio. And he is a major figure in European literature. He was kind of an Italian saucer, I suppose. And he writes about the Black Death in the Decameron, which is a collection of 100 short stories. And I just want to share

an extract with you both about a description of the Florentine plague, basically. I think it'd be interesting then, Helen, to talk to you about how this matches up with an English experience and if you see anything that's particularly unique to the Florentine experience. But I'll read the extract first. It says, This scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children as though they did not belong to them. I mean, it's almost impossible for us to understand this, even

having been through a pandemic ourselves. Does this match up to the English archive as well, Helen, or do you see this as being a very unique situation? No, it doesn't. To put it bluntly, I think it is a very exaggerated literary account of the plague. And of course, Pocaccio delivers this incredibly powerful opening to Cameron and talks about how the plague enters Florence and the panic and the fear. I think you do get a very strong sense of the panic and the fear. Of course, he talks about the physical symptoms of the plague. With the bubonic plague,

as he describes these lumps under the armpits and the neck, that was universal. That was something that anybody who was infected with plague did experience, particularly the bubonic plague. anybody who was infected with plague did experience, particularly the bubonic plague. But one of the things that I will say is from the work that I have done, and I would say that this certainly applied to Italy and the rest of Europe and Northern Europe as well. In fact, the world, I don't think people were abandoning their loved ones. I think they cared very deeply for their loved ones. I don't think this was a case of people just throwing bodies into pits as what has been assumed and that has been a very popular cultural conception of the plague. People were just, it was chaos. Bodies were being

flung into pits. They were being burned on the street and dragged around. Actually, evidence shows it wasn't like that at all. So I think Bakatch all. I think his analysis here is quite rightly, and I think that you see that with a lot of medieval literary figures. You see a lot of exaggeration. There's a certain sense of mimesis and the idea that they're trying to create this sense of absolute catastrophe. What is the worst thing that we could possibly say? Let's make that happen. It's not that people weren't abandoning each other, that possibly did happen. But I think from what I've seen as in the record, it would show the opposite that people were actually very caring for the dead and they were also very considerate for the people who lived

around them within their communities because even in Florence, as it was anywhere else, community and your parish was everything. So what you're saying is Helen Carr says, Pocaccio can get in the bin. Her official stance. We're going to use that as your statement. Okay. Yeah. Quote me on that.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So Helen, tell me what it would have been like to actually catch plague. What are the symptoms to look out for? At what point would you start to panic? Good question. So it took a while. So the plague virus lived within the body for about a week and then it was the actual symptoms started to appear and then you'd really have a few days. So some of the faster moving plagues, there were different types of plague, but

the most virulent, the most infections were the pneumonic plague and the bubonic plague. And so the pneumonic plague would be sort of a pneumonia of sorts, but the bubonic plague was the most famous and the most virulent. And that happened over a case of three days. You start to become really unwell. You'd start to develop these sort of flu-like symptoms. That's always what the NHS says. Do you look out for flu-like symptoms for like everything, right? There was no one, one, one to ring. Yeah. There was no like, what version of the plague is this one? Couldn't Google. Yeah. No, it was a case of you'd be very, very

unwell. You'd need to rest. You'd need to lie down. You'd stop wanting to drink water. And then you'd start to sweat profusely. And that's when you'd start to see these sorts of blackening around the body. And they become these plaid buboes. Some of them are huge. They were usually in your lymph nodes, so under your armpits, around your neck, around the groin. And they were hard. They were like boiled eggs under the skin. And because of the infected blood, they would, Anthony's face right now is quite funny, because of the infected blood, they would start to go black. And that's where this idea of black plague, black spot started to develop. I have to say I've always imagined the bubo's being soft and sort of poppable and now you're saying they're hard.

That's so much worse. Yeah. Generally, if people did survive the bubo's burst, if you did survive it, my goodness, you were like, walking around with the sort of swagger as the first group of people who had their COVID jabs. You know, it was like, you were good. You were good. If you're like me, and you love history, but in in particular you love the smutty, salacious, gossipy history, then do I have the perfect podcast for you. If you fancy finding out about the slippery origins of lube or how Vikings linked sex and magic together, then listen no further. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets where I delve into the

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are going to myth bust in another episode and spoiler alert, it comes to a later century. It's not from the 14th century. But we come with all these ideas of what the plague was like, what the experience was like. And a lot of that, I suppose, is down to the sources that are left to us, like Boccaccio. And what is it like as a historian of this period, Helen, having to dig down beneath that and find other ways of telling the history and other pieces of evidence? How do you piece together the experience and also the emotions of ordinary people in this moment when the only written records that we seem to have are from people who for various different motivations want to paint a slightly different

picture from what the reality is. So I think being a medieval historian, which might differ from being a historian of other periods, is that you have to sort of cast your net slightly wider and you have to think about things on multiple different terms. So you might have to read papers on archaeology, bio-archaeology, if I'm getting that right. Obviously, did that reading. Clearly. And literary, you know, you have to look at sort of literary historians' work and you have to look at art historians' work. You have to really consider, you have to think of a really macro, broad picture of what this century looked like, felt like, smelt like, how people were preserved, how they died,

all of these things. Because the information doesn't exist. One thing that we do have as historians of the Black Death is that there is a distinct lacuna in the record as to what we know happened. There's very little to say, well, this happened and this individual person here felt like this about it. They were very scared. They were very upset. So we have to think more broadly and you have to also expand outside of your, say for example, I work on medieval England. I was looking at records from Syria. I was also looking at records from Florence, looking at Pachachista Cameron. And what you do get a sense of is this huge sense of fear and panic from those written records but then closer to home you look at things that emerge later. This is when people

were living with this PTSD of the Black Death. They weren't painting – well, they might have been painting on church walls as to what was going on but that doesn't survive. What does survive is later representations of a very distinct – there's almost like the space between life and death has become thinner for people. They live with death in a way that people didn't necessarily live with death to quite the same extent as before. Certainly, the way they lived with death is incomparable to how we feel about it today. It's something that was an accepted norm. And around through this, and this is throughout Europe, the cult of memento mori became huge. So this is into the later 14th century, particularly into the 15th century. And in Italy, with

the development of the Renaissance, you see a lot of this. So examples would be the dance macabre. So there's the skeletons dancing around with the living in a circle, singing ring-a-ring-a-roses, etc. It's that kind of visual representation of death and life being very close together and being inevitable. You do get more of these visual representations of doom paintings, the apocalypse happening because people did think that the Black Death in that moment was an apocalypse. They thought it was God's wrath. Is this the end of the world? Then when you're thinking about archaeology, the really interesting things that has been discovered is that people weren't buried sort of flung into plague pits or not buried at all. They were actually buried very carefully and they were buried sort of one stacked on top of each other

very neatly and that was only in the rare case that there were large pits. Most of the time families were often buried together or you would have couples buried together. There was a lot more humanity shown towards people than I think has been previously assumed and you see this across Europe. It's not just what I've worked on in England. You definitely see it in Florence as well. Will Barron It's so interesting, isn't it? Because Picaccio's account is so full of this panic that you speak of and this feeling that society is breaking down, that parents are rejecting and abandoning their children, that nature has been

turned on its head. It's easy to think when you contemplate the scale of this, that potentially up to 60% of the population was lost, it is easy to imagine that dignity and humanity would go out the window. Yet what you're saying is really the opposite and that there was a sensitivity there and a striving for dignity that I think we in our own moment in the modern world would like to think that we possess. I think the popular vision, again, kind of trying to myth-bust this a little bit, the popular vision of the medieval period is that it is dull, it's the quote unquote dark ages. That's a well-rehearsed argument now to kind of reject that hypothesis. But I think when it comes to the Black Death, there's still this feeling

that everything was turned on its head, that people abandoned their roles in society, their beliefs and gave into fear. And sure, fear was prevalent, but actually there's an effort to resist that and to keep hold of some form of normalcy or goodness, I suppose. Do you think that's fair? I think it's fair. I mean, I think there were practical measures taken for sure. People were locking themselves away. People were ingesting anything that they thought they could. There was a spiritual remedy that was concocted which talked about having to swallow your sins, swallow all of these horrible things that you've done in your life and then go and vomit

somewhere. It was a spiritual purge to try and quell God's wrath. And then there was also examples of the flagellants which we might come to shortly. But I think that by and large people did care about their loved ones. I mean, what do we do? We turn inwards, we look at the people we love. We don't think on selfish terms, the fear usually comes from the fear of something happening to somebody that you love dearly. We know that people experienced love. They experienced love in the Middle Ages. It was an emotion that was conceived and experienced in very, very evocative and they demonstrated it in an incredibly powerful ways. I think that people did care about their loved ones, but they also crucially cared about their community. Community was

such a huge thing to people living in the 14th century. Your parish was like your family. Of the records that I looked at, there was a man who in his will wanted to leave all of his material wealth to his parish, to his community. He took a chest of his gold and he gave it to his parish church. He said, keep it there for people to have if they need it. When they have managed to pull themselves out of the hard times, they can refund it and it can be available for somebody else. It was this sense of community and collective support. I think that is something you see. And if you look at the establishment of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, that was established by the community to pray for the souls of the dead because the church, the local parish, was

so overwhelmed with the amount of people that were dying. And so the community created a space that the souls of the dead could be prayed for. This space between this movement between life into death was taken very seriously. It was a process that felt like it was a human right to have aided by somebody and you expected to receive that spiritual support and salvation in the same way as you receive it on a very medical basis now as a basic human right. So, I think people were far more aware and concerned for each other even though there was this collective panic and practical measures were put in place. When it came to the emotional side of it, I think it was a collective experience. Everybody was in the same boat.

side of it. I think it was a collective experience. Everybody was in the same boat. You mentioned the flagellants there, Helen, and that's one of the groups of people that might stand out when we're talking about these kind of histories. Give us a little bit of an insight as to exactly what a flagellant was. The clue is in the name. They were self-flagellators. What they did is they were groups of people, mostly men who came over from Northern Europe and they traveled into England. So I'll start with England, but there is an interesting case in Italy as well. They moved into England and they would travel through the country. Great, thanks guys, probably spreading plague as they went. And they were doing this as an act of extreme penitence. It was trying to mimic the pain of Christ as he was

going to his death. And so they were walking along chanting in tandem and then they had their own whip and they would be self-flagellating with this whip. But it was a whip with sort of, it was a scourge, so it had lots of different threads on it and it had at the end a knot and on the knot was tied little bits of glass or thorn and they would walk around, they would keep whipping themselves and then on occasion they would stop and lie down in the shape of the cross and then they get up and carry on again. So they walked almost naked, they wore just a cloth, not quite a loin cloth, they were slightly more covered than that. It was like a knee-length sort of cloth around

their bodies, a bit of linen and then they just walked through the country flagellating and what they were, I can imagine, quite an intimidating spectacle. You saw something similar in Italy, but these people were called the Bianchi and they weren't quite as naked as the flagellants who moved through England. They wore white robes and these sort of canonical headdresses as well sometimes. It was also men and women and sometimes children and they had the same act. They would walk from town to town. So it would be communities of people and they'd be richly self-flagellating. How were they looked upon by the communities that they moved through, Helen? Was this seen as an unusual thing to do or were people grateful that this small group of people was taking

it upon themselves to ask forgiveness for God during this great punishment, as it were. It's really hard to know. This is where some of the more methodical ways of looking at the history of emotions come in because sometimes it's hard to tell how people felt because do people even identify with the same feelings that we have today? Or they would do, but how would they describe those feelings? As far as we can tell in regard to what we know about the fledglings was that there wasn't much reaction to them. Maybe it was a sense of fear. People didn't want to disturb their practice. I think there probably was more of a collective understanding that this was a group of people acting for

the sake of humankind, not necessarily as an individual act. I think it wasn't always an individual act. Again, you saw a lot more of community-focused means of behaviour in this period. I think that it would probably have been the case that communities saw this as more of a selfless act in relation to trying to redeem mankind in some way, rather than something that they were angry about or fearful that these people were spreading. I suppose in their minds, it was a very extreme act of religious penance, the level up from what the clerics were enacting in the churches. Let's talk about some of those practical

steps that were put in place. I'm taking us back to Italy, not so much to Florence, just to a city outside, a little outside of Florence, and it's called Pistoia. I have some ordinances from May 1348 here in front of me. I'm just going to read it. It's quite listy, so if anybody wants to interject at any point, please do. But these are some of the steps that you're talking about, the steps that communities are taking, and these are some of the steps that the community in question here is taking to try and keep that link. You said earlier Helen, which I really loved, that that kind of closeness to death started to become even closer than it had been before, that people were living with death.

And I think these are some of the measures that they took to try and keep death at bay for as long as they could. So in the Pistorian ordinances of 1348, no one was to enter the city or leave the city or district without the council's prior written permission. So that's one of the things that they put in place there. No one was to bring anything into the city or the district, including used cloth. If they did, they'd be burned in the main square. I also kind of like this idea that it's very visual, that punishment of getting rid of any potentially infected items, such as cloth or clothing, they're just going to burn them

in the central square, which is quite interesting. Corpses may be taken out of homes only in caskets sealed to confine foul odor and must be buried with them. So we're talking about that contagious and anti-miasma thing there. So it's interesting because clearly in Italy they're also believing in this miasmic transfer of the plague that we see in England as well. Graves are to be dug about 1.45 meters deep to confine the corpses foul stench, Again, miasma, we're talking about this smell that people pretend before germ theory, people are thinking that that's maybe how they're catching this illness. This is nothing new. So does that suggest that people in the Black Death

in particular are being buried in a different way, Helen? You talked about coffins being stacked one on top of the other. Are they being buried closer to the surface as a general rule because they're dying so quickly? I think people were stacked in coffins. I think they were buried without any sort of encasement. A lot of the time I haven't seen any evidence of people being buried. I mean, if you were a wealthy person and you had something kind of preconceived, pre-put in place, then maybe some people were buried in those terms. I mean, certainly we know that there were people like royalty, nobility, who were buried in coffins and they had a proper burial. But for the laymen, it was these plague pits. It's funny because we talk about some of these measures being pre-germ theory, but there

was an idea, they weren't quite sure of the spread, but there was an idea that something is moving from one set of people to another set of people. And they didn't quite know what it was even causing the problem. We see in these ordinances as well that butchers came in for a lot of scrutiny. So they were asked not to put any filthy matter or any carcasses hanging out. Often we see that in a period drama or something where there's a carcass hanging to advertise the wares. There is an understanding that something is carrying this, but they're just not entirely sure. Helen, do we have a similar set of ordinances for England at all? Are they being so prescriptive in England or is it something that's far more organic? No, it's equally very prescriptive. And so this is a case that I think across Europe,

across any of the countries that were affected by plague, very practical measures were put in place. It's interesting what you were saying earlier, Maddie, about this idea that the Middle Ages, it's still a dark age, that people wouldn't have any sort of sense of science or bacteria. But actually, they really did. I mean, yes, they were God-fearing communities and they were God-fearing people. When they say the wrath of God, I don't think they thought that God was selecting them as individuals and going, you next. I think that they thought that it was a collective effort against God as to why he thought, well, now we have to – I mean, everything's biblical. There's obviously the biblical plagues. People probably linked it back to that, but that doesn't mean that their knowledge of how

to keep themselves clean and healthy was absent. People were clean. People used soap. People washed. People did take care of their bodies and themselves. So some of the practical measures that were put in place in England were they had all of the drains moved. They didn't want to have any sort of filth or waste coming through drainage systems. They also made sure that any plague pits were buried away from the city. So Smithfield, there was a plague pit there. So that was outside of the city. They didn't want any plague pits near the walls. There were also very practical measures about people having to stay within their homes if

they had a member of the family that was infected with plague. Again, very understandable, very practical, very pragmatic decisions were made. It's very community-minded in a way that I think we probably don't recognise now. In 2020 and the COVID pandemic, there was a struggle for everyone to accept that we had to take communal responsibility and act as a group and not as individuals. What you're describing in the medieval period here, Helen, is that actually people already lived in these terms, in these communities and that dealing with something like this whilst traumatic on a mass scale, the way that they met those challenges was very community minded, which is fascinating.

The other thing that's really interesting to me, I'm just looking at this list again and thinking about how you were describing Helen accessing the emotions of the period and how we can get to the real human experience. One of the rules for Pestoia here is that to avoid scaring the sick, the cathedral bells must not be rung during funerals. That is so emotive to me. it takes you straight away into the landscape, the cityscape, the soundscape of this moment. Yeah, the soundscape is wonderful, isn't it? Because these were communities where their day was dictated by the tolling of the parish church and the bells, but also with the funerals

of the dead, even if these were mass funerals. But it also says, the funerals, does that mean mass funerals? Is that an individual? Was there a lot more respect that was being paid than Boccaccio is saying in his Decameron? If you look at that, which is evidence in the record in Florence, it's kind of countering what Boccaccio is saying about people not caring and people abandoning everything and everyone. That seems to me much more a case of people being incredibly thoughtful and caring and community minded and conscious of the fear of death for those who were suffering. I mean that's not abandon authorities in this scenario. Do you see in England the authorities acting in the same way, Helen? We're sort of thinking about this very community-based approach and we've talked

about the peasant experience, but how effective were authorities in England in dealing with this or putting similar measures in place? Helen One of the major authorities was the church and the church sort of responded in quite punitive ways. Obviously, these practical measures that were taking place, but some of them, it was a lot of blame culture within the church and the clerical records. There's things like people blaming people's items of clothing, people were wearing shoes that were too long, or it was appalling behavior. There was this licentiousness of the court and the over-partying, overzealous

nature of the king and his government. Then there was also a really interesting one about blaming young children and saying that young children not listening to their parents and doing as they're told, they invited this wrath of God and they invited this plague and so therefore they should be punished even so far as death. I was like, my gosh, can you imagine levelling that at my two kids when I need to get their shoes on in the morning to get to school? I mean, that would be quite an impressive feat, wouldn't it? It's like you count yourself lucky in the 21st century because – so the church was a big authority and they did respond in certain ways that

were incredibly punitive like that and the blaming, but they also conducted a significant amount of additional prayers. There were increased services. They increased the amount of services that they were giving. They were preaching more radically. They were more active within the community than I think they ever had been. So at this point clerics were doctors. They were also medics, but they were also those who were giving the spiritual care at the end of life, they were sort of the effective front line. So there is this faction of the church that was being angry and quite sort of cruel in their approach to how to people's actions in the development of the Black Death. But then they were also these people who were the primary caregivers

for people at the end of life and those who were sick looked at the church for both physical and spiritual salvation. And then the government was practical, but the more sort of I would say rash measures came slightly later when they started to see a shift in the way that people were behaving after the plague. So when you had this initial loss of life, the jurisdiction that had to be put in place like the Statute of Labourers, et cetera, in 1352. But again, their measures were more a case of moving everything out of the cities. Government was postponed. There was no parliament. There were no sort of large group meetings. But I think, to be honest,

it was all such a disaster and such a mess. It's difficult sometimes to locate exactly what went on because there's not always surviving evidence. But I imagine there was a lot more structure in place and a lot more authority put in place when there needed to be. It's funny you should say that actually Helen because we do have an example from Milan specifically where the Visconti family who were the kind of ruling family there, as soon as they got the slightest whiff of plague heading their way, they shut the city up immediately. And there's even stories, you know, you're talking about some of those more draconian

things that were happening, which especially to 21st century eyes look particularly cruel. So for instance, in Milan, they had examples of forcibly bricking people into their houses so they couldn't get out and they couldn't spread the disease if they thought that they were potentially infected. However, Milan had significantly fewer deaths from plague than most other Italian cities. So it's kind of hinting at this thing you were talking about earlier, Helen, whereas they have knowledge about how this is spreading to a certain extent and they know certain things that they need to do to stop this. This isn't a totally naive group of people, even though, you know, as we say, some of the measures seem, I would not have liked to have been bricked into my house when I

caught COVID for the first time, for instance, you know, but it's, it's interesting that it's happening nonetheless and that it's having an impact, fewer deaths because of it. Yeah. And I think that it's interesting because some of the earliest examinations that were going on and this sort of panic is to try and understand medically what this was about is happening in Avignon. That was the papacy at the time, but it was also a place where a lot of this medical work and research was being conducted. They discovered evidence about the buboes. They understood that buboes were the physical manifestation of this illness.

They knew that it was something that was incredibly transmissible through people. They learned all of this in quite a quick succession. They did learn quickly and they did put measures in place. I don't think really that dissimilar to the measures that we put in place in the 21st century. Will Barron It's a funny balance, isn't it, of common sense, what seems to us to be common sense, and then some, as you say, Anthony, quite cruel measures really bricking people up inside their homes. I'm just wondering, Helen, what's the weirdest thing you've come across people doing to try

and avoid catching the plague? Do people behave in strange ways, maybe not across Europe, but have you come across individuals doing odd things? Yeah. People eating strange things, people would eat odd foods. There's an account that came out of Aleppo in Syria. They would smear their buboes with clay. They would spray perfumes to an incense around their homes like camphor and sandal. Oh, and there's another one that is if you put onions, vinegar and sardines together as part of a daily meal, that apparently had some kind repellent. But I'm guessing because of the smell. Nobody's snogging you after you've had that, let's be honest. No, and there's no Smintz in the 14th century. But yeah, there were lots of different natural remedies that they

thought could help. But in the end, it's, you know, it's why modern medicine is just such a gift. Helena, it'd be really interesting before we kind of wrap up, just to talk about what life after 1351 started to look like. Now, we know that this isn't the last time the plague reappears, but how do people start to return to normality and what does that look like for them? Has normality changed? Is this a different world they're entering into in 1351 or is it business as usual? I think a combination of the both. It's really strange, and obviously in many ways this is entirely incomparable, and sometimes I think it's very basic to try and compare plague

to Covid. But if you think about how naturally we returned to life, it's almost as if, yeah, that weird time that we were locked away for two years. We're all aware of it and it's part of our daily lexicon, but it's not something that we have just sort of gone through and carried on. I think there is an element of human nature that does just carry on. It's how we survive. It's how we continue to exist as a species. With regard to the plague, there were great changes, the largest of which is this completely removal of a social class of deservedum. As I mentioned before, this sense of a fatalistic existence ceased to exist.

You had much more growth in merchant classes, so the merchant class became a hugely important social group. They had a lot of power and influence. By the end of the 14th century, they were involved in government, they were loaning money to the king and the crown. They were a really important and incredibly powerful and quite large group of people that really developed and emerged after the Black Death. There has been a so-called golden age, particularly for women because more men initially died, particularly in the first wave of plague than women did. And so

women were stepping into traditional roles of men. So they were becoming armorers or they were becoming butchers. And they were moving out of the home and they were working effective shop fronts and they had their children, their family around them. But they were working as individual traders. You've found soil, which was sort of a single woman. You saw an increase of the famed soil traders. What is interesting as well is the development of ale drinking, the Brewsters. Women were traditionally used to brew ale. They were called Brewsters. They used to do that from inside the home and instead they went out and created effectively what we call now breweries.

And so they were working in these warehouses together. You saw the advent of horology. So clocks, you started to see clocks in more locations than your parish and certainly this was happening in Italy as well. Clocks would often be placed. It was like an age of innovation. It was technology. There were fewer people to do things by hand. So they had to think of innovative ways to do it. So it's a little bit like the mill, so grinding the grain for bread, they had the water mill started to come into fruition. You saw increase of water mills because they just had fewer hands, so they had to think of ways to make things happen faster. It was an incredibly innovative time. There was a lot more of that. Yes, this rise of technology, So you've had the tolling of the church bell, you'd also have the clock

opposite the church and your people would be able to start telling the time. And I think that in many ways, it sort of gave rise to a different type of Renaissance. It was like a new age of existing and being and a development of these great technologies. A literary boom saw people started talking the vernacular, particularly in England. It was just the absence of people in a nutshell and in a very basic way, made people think harder. Two takeaways from this. First of all, I think some of the most exciting, if not the most exciting work on medieval period is being now done by female historians. And I think the injection of female voices is bringing a whole new audience to this period. It's

also telling these histories in a whole new, more nuanced, dare I say it, way. And I just think it's time for the women to lead on medieval history and that's why I think books like Femina, books like your book, they're just so timely and so important that those voices are being heard now. So it's very exciting. I think women look at the record differently. And I mean, everyone comes to the record with their own bias, don't they, and their own sense of the world. But women look at sources and they read them differently. So in this book, there is a case where for years, it's always been written in the record that a woman was lying because it's been written by men. She's lying, she's lying,

she's lying. You have to buy the book to read it. But she said this, but actually it turns out, when I read it back, I was like, she wasn't lying. So this is the case, a woman thought she was pregnant. And they were saying she was lying. She couldn't have been pregnant. And actually I realized looking at it from a different perspective that she had an early case of pseudo-siasis, which is a well-known biological and mental condition, which is where your body shows all the signs of pregnancy, but you're not actually with child. And she'd been told throughout her life, and then as it had been written the historical records thereafter, that she was lying. And I don't think she was at all. Yeah. That's so human, I think, as well. And this is kind of what I mean by that nuance

thing. The other thing I will take as well, I don't know why I find this so fascinating, you know, they sometimes just hook onto a very small detail, but the idea that clocks start appearing more after the Black Death for some reason. That's Anthony's major takeaway. Honestly, that's really struck with me. I'm like, oh my God, can you imagine if clocks just start popping up in your town and probably not quite in your village just yet? But I'm just like, oh my God, I mean, it just, for some reason that changes the world for me slightly. Everyone's dead. Do you know what we need? Clocks.

I'll take a clock, please. Okay, so clocks and diversity of historians' voices are the major takeaway of this episode. Helen, thank you so much. This has been absolutely fantastic. Well, thank you for having me. If people want to pre-order your book before it's out, where can they do that? So the best place to do that is good old Waterstones. You can pre-order it there or any other place on lines, but I have to give the big plug for Waterstones because they're very nice. Fantastic. Well, if you have enjoyed this episode of After Dark, you can get in touch

at AfterDark at historyhit.com. We love to hear from you with suggestions for topics, thoughts on previous episodes and just general feedback. We just love to interact with and get to know our listeners. You can also leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. See you soon.