After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Black Death: the Deadliest Plague

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

It was beyond Biblical in its horror. Half of all Europeans are estimated to have died in the Black Death, maybe more. Death ravaged towns and villages, castles and hovels. What did it feel like to live through this darkest of histories? Bestselling author Helen Carr guides Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling through disease, death and self-flagellation! Helen's new book on the fourteenth century, Sceptred Isle, will be out next May.Edited by Max Hennessy and Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Canada may be known for its landscapes and friendly people, but beneath the surface lies a darker side of crime, history, and the paranormal. Since 2017, the award-winning Dark Poutine podcast has explored the shadowy corners of the Great White North and beyond, delivering chilling tales from a uniquely Canadian perspective. Hosted by Mike Brown and Matthew Stockton with over 300 episodes and fresh releases every Monday, Dark Poutine is your weekly ticket to the creepier side of Canada. Listen to Dark Poutine on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most meal replacements are rough on sensitive stomachs, not Sperry. Sperry is a complete plant-based meal crafted for better digestion.

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Try Sperry and get 15% off at Sperry.ca with code podcast 15. Sperry and get 15% off at Sperry.ca with code podcast 15. Sperry, trust nature. In the year 1346, rumors were moving around Europe of strange and dark news coming out of the Eastern Kingdoms of Kathay and India. There were stories of serpents and toads falling from the sky like thick rain, slithering into homes and devouring numberless people, injecting them with poison and gnawing at their limbs. There was talk of earthquakes that cast down whole cities, and of unquenchable fires from the sky that burned all night and ate up any who fell prey to the flames.

But for those in Europe hearing such strange tales, life, for now, continued as much as it had always done. In the same year that rumours from the East first began to circulate, in England, Edward III was preparing for the marriage of his young daughter Joan, to the eldest son of Maria of Portugal and King Alfonso XI of Castile. The negotiations had been lengthy, so it wasn't until two years later, in the fateful year of 1348, that the fourteen-year-old Princess Joan set out for her wedding and new life on the continent. By then, stories from the East were beginning to stick. Joan's parents watched their young daughter board a ship from Plymouth bound for Bordeaux and filled with treasures, among them a beautiful wedding cloak of golden silk.

With her went a bodyguard of fifty armed men, many of them knights or famous archers, though none were able to save her or themselves from the dangers that awaited them. For there would be no wedding. The years of preparation had all been in vain. The plagues that had, it was told, already ruined Kathay and India, were no longer a thing from the periphery of a Eurocentric world. They had arrived on the streets of European cities

spreading out with terrible rapidity to its farthest flung villages. Nothing now could save Joan, daughter of Edward III, from the Black Death. Well, díagóid t'agus cunnit a tó tu agus welcome to After Dark. My name is Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And we're speaking Irish today for some reason, I don't know why. I've taken aback by the Irish, hello. It just came to me, I went with it. The Black Death, that's what we're talking about today.

Not because I spoke Irish, I don't know why that happened, it just did. For a long time, as you probably know, it has been, the Black Death has been associated with some of the most nightmarish ideas of what it was like to live in the Middle Ages. And we'll get into some of those details. But there's something new in it for us now, I think, for people who have lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. Not that it's entirely relatable, but we have a bit of an insight that maybe we didn't have before. But here to guide us through the history, this difficult history, is Helen Carr, who is a historian and a bestselling author of The Red Prince, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

And Helen has also just finished writing a brand new book, which is coming out next year, all about the 14th century. And for fans of Helen and History Hit together, you will know that there is some news that you might be very excited about. And that is that Helen has a brand new documentary coming out about the battle for Scotland. And that will be on History Hit TV soon. Can't wait for that. But first of all, Helen, welcome. Thank you so much for coming to After Dark Towers. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so looking forward to it and I'm a big fan of the podcast. So it's a joy to be here. A joy to be here chatting about the Black Death.

But Helen, most people have an idea, right, about what the Black Death was. And some of those ideas might be mistaken slightly. So tell us, in the simplest terms, for those who don't know, what exactly was the Black Death? Well, the Black Death is a pretty modern term in itself. It was actually a 19th century moniker. It was made up really to identify the symptoms of the Black Death. In its time, contemporaneously it was called the pestilence or the pest. And it was a pandemic that devastated Latin Christendom, killing up to 60% of the population.

So that's across the West and also North Africa. And it was really a bacteria called Yersinia pestis. That was the cause of this pandemic. And once it was absorbed into the bloodstream, and that was usually by a flea bite or contact with infected tissue, and you can imagine in the 14th century how many fleas were roaming around, this bacteria spread through the body, so it was going through the blood vessels and sinew until it eventually killed its host. What people probably don't know, that there were three different

variations of the plague, and that was were three different variations of the plague. And that was actually discovered quite soon into the pandemic. So it was the bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic. And the most famous one is the bubonic plague. And this was most famously described by the author Boccaccio, who witnessed the onset of plague in his hometown in Florence, and it was written down in his Decameron, and he describes the symptoms as certain swellings that appeared on both men and women either on the groin or under the armpits, and some

of these swellings grew as big as an ordinary apple, others like an egg. And these were what people called plague boils. And then the boils turned black and they started, he called it livid contagion, and they spread over the arms and thighs. And it was considered, as he calls it, an unmistakable token of coming death. So it was these huge swellings that turned black that kind of appeared over the body. And so it was this unmistakable, visible symptom of the impending end. It must have been so terrifying to look down and realise that you or someone you loved had these blackened boils growing on them. How many people did this actually kill? Because I think when it comes, it's a little bit like the witch trials when it comes to the plagues of the medieval era. There are so many different statistics flying around and people do like to exaggerate. Do we know how many people

actually died? Not exactly. There was no way of telling because you didn't have birth records and death records by this point. That didn't come to law for the Reformation. And so I think the only way that we have some kind of idea is through clerical records as to how many priests died in the process in that sort of the global west analysis. But they think between 50 to 60 percent of the population. Certainly, you have certain demographics that perished more than others. So people who were living in close quarters, people who were poorer, the elderly, for example, died more frequently than people who were wealthier. But the plague didn't discriminate.

It wasn't a case of hygiene. It was a case of luck and proximity. And if you had somebody within your locale who was infected. And so that was, you know, as we've just heard from your wonderful intro to the podcast, that that could even affect kings and princesses, not just your lowly peasant. So where did this come from then, Helen? Do we know? Can we even make an educator guess?

Yeah. So they think that it came from Asia. It's difficult to know exactly where, but it sort of started to appear around 1347. We think it was mostly carried by marmots in the central Asia area. So the Black Death is always associated with rats, but actually it was some larger rodents that were the source of the original first waves of plague. So these rodents, these large marmot rodents, which if you Google them, they're actually quite cute. So it's quite... I'm doing that as we speak. Yeah, I'm going to Google right now. Yeah, they're really sweet. They're a bit like my toddler. And they existed well away from human habitation, but in the late Middle Ages, so this is a few years,

about a decade before the plague emerged, the largest land empire in history started to spread and that was the Mongol Empire. And for the Mongols, marmots became food and fur and leather, but they were super itinerant. These Mongol hordes, you know, they would ride across the Tian Shan mountain range, and that was from the late, that was beginning around in the late 13th century. And so through food and fur, these Mongols repeatedly exposed themselves to this Yersinia pestis, which is what these Marmots carried. And they carried it for thousands of miles. But marmot meat was not the only thing that the Mongols consumed. They also had sacks of grain with them, particularly millet. And grain also traditionally attracts

rodents. And so they were starting to carry rats with them and the rats were starting to become infected with the Yersinopestis. And it was, according to an Italian source, this all came to the West through the Siege of Caffa, which they thought brought the plague to Western Europe via effectively biological warfare. So the story goes, and I don't think this is true, but it's a great story, the Mongol army besieged the genuine port of Kaffir in 1346 and they allegedly launched these plague-ridden bodies over the city walls, infested and putrid by the plague with all these boils all over them. And the belief was that the plague was spread by miasmas or the stench of this putrefying corpse. And even though that was quite a convincing

hypothesis is not really the truth. I mean, more realistically, it was these sacks of grains that were traveling from these various ports across into Western Europe with rodents inside them or around them that were already infected with Yersinia pestis. And that's really how it started to creep across into Europe and into England, eventually as well. So there's these two really competing narratives here. We've got on the one hand, this active, very purposeful spreading of the disease through, as you say, biological warfare. And then you've got actually something, in some ways far more insidious that there are

just rats creeping into every town and city, every port, every ship in Europe and bringing that into the households of the highest and lowest as well. Let's talk about the whole gamut of medieval society that was affected by this. And we heard at the beginning about Princess Joan, who's just 14, when she heads across the channel to get married. Well, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about who she is and how do we know what happens to her specifically in this period? Yeah. So there is actually remarkably little on Joan. And I wanted to tell her story in my forthcoming book, because she's always been a bit of a footnote in history in regard

to not only the plague, but in regard to any royal history that has been written about in this period. And part of the reason for that is it's so difficult to track down what actually happened to her. So she was set to go off to marry Pedro, later called Pedro the Cruel. So I'm not entirely sure what fate would have served her best. Lucky escape there. Yeah. Is it? I'm not sure what would have been a better outcome. Black Death or...? Yeah. He wasn't great. He actually ended up probably murdering his wife. So lucky Joan,

either way. So she went, she was only 14. But what's so affecting about this story is she, one of the surviving sources that we do have is her trousseau. And we know all of these beautiful things that had been so carefully chosen by her parents to demonstrate that they were a European superpower. Edward III had just won the Battle of Crecy. He had taken Calais by storm. He was spreading his influence across Europe. He was at war with France and he wanted to show Spain that he was powerful and he wanted them to be his ally. And he had to show that through his daughter. So there was a lot of pressure on her to do a good job really in this marriage. She went over this gorgeous trousseau and she had headboards

and she had looking glasses and she had these golden robes to wear on her wedding day. She had beautifully ornate saddles that were interlaced with pearls and jewels. It was extraordinary wealth that was heading over the channel and she landed at Bordeaux. And that's all we know is that she landed at Bordeaux. Oh wow. So she disembarked. We know the ship that she disembarked from and she would have been dropped off and then the ship left again. And she would have had ladies, she had, I think, at least four very close ladies

in waiting because she had saddles made for them. And she traveled into Bordeaux and then at some point her entourage left Bordeaux. But we don't know if they left with Joan. All we know is that they left and went into one of the smaller villages, Sandlerimo. And some people, some historians have suggested that Joan died at Sandlerimo, but I know that later, in the 1380s, John of Gaunt endowed an obit for Joan at her burial place in Bordeaux Cathedral. So I think she died in Bordeaux and then her household moved on. And it was only around September time that one messenger came back and told the king and queen that their daughter

had died of plague. And what we do have is their response to that and their notifying, the King of Castile, and you have this really affecting and sad expression of their parental grief in that letter. That's all we really know is when her household account ends and that fact she was buried in Bordeaux in the cathedral beneath the choir, but we don't know what happened in that time. So my hypothesis is that she probably landed in Bordeaux, they didn't realize what they were sailing into. They would have found out pretty quickly. This was the height of plague in France, in southern France during this period. And judging from the sources that came out of France around the same time, you can get an idea of the sorts of things they were

experiencing, burial pits, fires, terror, people locking themselves inside their homes. And I think she probably went and took refuge in Bordeaux, in the castle in Bordeaux, where she thought she would find safety with her household. And some of her household would have certainly died. We don't know who, but we do know that one of them managed to return back on a ship and notify the king and queen around September. And I think Joan probably died around July. We think she died around July.

I was going to say early August, but I think that's too late. I think it was probably early July that she actually died. So reasonably quickly within a couple of months of arriving. If you've never done archival research before and you're listening to this podcast, do not underestimate the amount of work that Helen has put in to come up with that chain of events. That is some serious historical research right there. I cannot wait to read a little bit more about this in the book. But just to leave Joan in Bordeaux then and start thinking about this move into the plague into England.

And you've said that, you know, we're looking at the end of the 1340s for this. Yeah. What do people think is happening initially? In the very first, so we have no news like we experienced at the outbreak of COVID, where we knew this was coming, although I'm imagining that word is traveling from Europe for quite some time, potentially. So what do they actually think is happening as soon as plague hits England? So I think that when the plague is in France and it starts to spread through France, I think that

there's going to be some kind of idea as to what is coming. That there's something happening, there's something deadly, there's something moving. But what I don't think people were aware of was the fact that a pandemic would spread sort of globally. I think that there were always isolated cases of things spreading and people becoming sick and possibly dying. But I don't think it became a fear until it was one of those moments where it was on your doorstep. People were certainly aware and they were worried. In the same way, I think, as we can identify with that daily news report of how COVID was popping up in

Italy, and then it was popping, and we were just waiting for that moment. But what I think is also very similar to our experience of COVID is that it wasn't this case of plague is like a sort of a death ship that just sails and as it reaches places people start to die. It is something that it was incredibly difficult to trace. If somebody came from France and then travelled up to Hull and they were infected with plague, there might be a little outbreak in Hull. But then there also might be an outbreak in Southampton and there might be an outbreak, you know, it wasn't like it had any rhyme or reason, it would just pop up. There was no real pattern apart from the more sort of macro perspective of it in that it sort

of spread through Italy and then it started to come into France and the low countries and then it would hit England. So it wasn't like it arrived in the southwest and then it moved all the way up the country. But I think the people's reaction, it's very difficult to know. We know how people started to react later when the plague was very much part of people's lives in England. And the way people did start to react was fear, panic. They thought that it was the wrath of God. They started to blame weird things like, you know, you have sources of clerics blaming the length of people's shoes and the bad attitudes of the royal household and the royal court, you know, with their partying and their sumptuous feasting and wearing... Men used to wear these little...

The only way I can describe it is it's sort of like a short dress and it goes over some very tight tights and it was called a poltok and you know they said it was because of these sorts of behaviours God is punishing us with the plague. So there was a lot of guilt. Well, after Dark listeners, we have an introduction to make on today's podcast. And the person we'd like to introduce is probably somebody you already know and if you don't you should get to know his podcast and that of course is Dan Snow, host of Dan Snow's History Hit. Dan, welcome to After Dark. Hey guys, well it's a great honor to be on the podcast, particularly because it's now such a behemoth, it's such a juggernaut, I'm very excited. Are you enjoying being part of the History Hit

family? Oh we absolutely are, it's been such a joy. And early on, it was so nice to borrow presenters from different History Hit podcasts and get to know everyone a little bit, get to know everyone's different approaches and perspectives to history. And I think, Dan, we're going to talk not about our own podcast here, but about your podcast. And the thing that I love and have to admit to you, I have been a real genuine listener of your pod for many years, not to out you on the age front here, Dan, but I really have been genuinely a fan. And one thing that I love in terms of that perspective, the angle that you bring is that it's so, you make history so relevant in terms of what's happening in the headlines right now. Is

that just your perspective on history, Dan? Is that just how you see the past and present and how they interlink? Thanks, Maddie. Yeah, I bet you've been listening to it ever since you were in primary school. Of course. My passion, I came from a family of journalists, but I always loved history. As you say, history is urgent. History is the reason that we got too much carbon in our atmosphere. It's the reason that America and China are eyeing each other up in the South China Sea. It's the reason that Vladimir Putin thinks Eastern or all of Ukraine is part of Russia. All of these things which are affecting our lives, those of our families, loved ones, children and their children and their children, all of those things are deeply rooted in our

past. So my passion is those episodes where I take up something that we're seeing today, Ukraine, the fervor of the American election, Brexit, Taiwan and Middle East Israel, Palestine. And I try and look into the deepest. So that is my passion. Having said that, I also just love banging out an episode on Francis Drake or Florence Nightingale, you know, the great narrative stories. I like doing both. I've always wanted my pod. I've never wanted to pin it down. I think like you guys with your podcast, you actually wanted to find yourself as widely as possible because it just makes it more interesting for us when we go to work.

But one of the things that works really well, I think, on your podcast, and if they're after dark listeners who don't listen to Dan's podcast, do because one of the things we share in common is this broad view, but really bringing in as you're saying, Dan, individual narratives to help locate those histories within people's lives and within the lives of people who are listening today. And what kind of narrative drive do you think mostly appeals to you when it comes to history? Because, you know, we can all do facts and figures, we can all Google google but what is it about those big sweeps of narrative history that really gets your interest peaked? Well you said it better than I could do I think really but it's the fact that it's the greatest

they're the greatest stories ever told like the best stories are true stories and then as well as these incredible kind of dramatic arcs that touch the lives of everybody, it's the human beings within them. It's the fact that we know enough about what it was like to be Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he drove through the streets of Sarajevo that day. We kind of have a pretty good idea of what was going through Kaiser Wilhelm's head as he mulled over the big decisions and Tsar Nicholas as they mulled over the decisions that basically plunged the world into catastrophic war and condemned their own families and their own regimes to oblivion or worse. So it's just those, as you say, the individuals being caught up in it is so fascinating. So it's telling the big story and then cutting back and reminding everyone that there are

families and humans driving these events and becoming caught up in these events. Thinking about some of those stories that we have in common, Dan, and some of those human elements that drive us all, I think, to tell history. The thing that I think we share is a love of stories and history set on ships. Now, we have covered so many ships on After Dark and they're always the most popular. We've done The Bounty, we've done HMS Terra. Recently, I listened, listened down to your episode on HMS Wager. I say listen, I ran to that. I have never downloaded anything quicker in my entire life. But for after dark listeners who do love a ship story, can you recommend any episodes on your pod

or indeed episodes that are not set on ships but that people absolutely need to hear? So yeah, HMS Wager that you mentioned, that's just a story that you couldn't make up. Shipwreck and mutiny, murder, an astonishing escape story. And that's true of episodes, for example, on mutiny on the bounty, Captain Bly on the bounty. I quite liked a recent one. Was Scott's expedition to the South Pole, was it actually sabotaged? It was definitely let down by, well, perhaps incompetence on the part of many people involved, but was it actually sabotaged? It was definitely let down by, well, perhaps incompetence on the part of many people involved, but was it actually maliciously sabotaged? That's the big question. That's a huge one.

But if people want to get away from the ice and the water, the desert and the mountains are available. So I've done a series on ancient Egypt recently and a series on the Inca in the Andes, which was an amazing experience. I got to walk the Inca trail through the Andes and just explored a civilization I knew nothing about. Well, you heard it here, folks. You can get your news and your alts from Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And honestly, you will not regret it. Download every episode right now. Canada may be known for its landscapes and friendly people, but beneath the surface lies a darker side of crime, history, and the paranormal.

Since 2017, the award-winning Dark Poutine podcast has explored the shadowy corners of the Great White North and beyond, delivering chilling tales from a uniquely Canadian perspective. Hosted by Mike Brown and Matthew Stockton with over 300 episodes and fresh releases every Monday, Dark Poutine is your weekly ticket to the creepier side of Canada. Listen to Dark Poutine on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most meal replacements are rough,

unsensitive stomachs, not Sperry. Sperry is a complete plant-based meal crafted for better digestion. What makes Sperry different? It's 100% allergen-free with no dairy or harsh artificial ingredients. So it's gentle on your stomach and safe for all common food allergies and digestive issues.

It's also packed with premium plant-based proteins to keep you satisfied, plus all the essential nutrients for sustained energy. Try Sperry and get 15% off at Sperry.ca with code podcast 15. Sperry, trust nature. I don't always like to draw too many direct links between the past and more present experiences because we'll often fall down a kind of a pit hole of mistakes when we do that. But nonetheless, some of the things that you're saying really are setting off little alerts in my mind of going, we know what that's like, we know what that's like, and we couldn't

possibly have known, you know, before five or six years ago. We're really starting to build this idea of what it was like as this plague starts to spread. But in our next narrative, Maddie is going to tell us a little bit more about some of the details of everyday experience during this time. As the Black Death engulfed England in 1348 and then Scotland the following year, church bells rang out incessantly for the dead. So loud and so relentless were they that in places they were muted, their ropes stayed and their drums deadened out of pity for the sick who lay dying, listening all the time to their dreadful toll. An eerie silence followed, falling heavy across the land, mist rolled across fields emptied

by pestilence. Homes stood empty and abandoned, livestock wandered unattended. The root of this evil was, to the people of the medieval world, obvious. This was a divine punishment from God, and rising to meet this terrible judgment came in the autumn of 1349, a new horror, the Flagellants. All over Europe, flagellants processed in the streets naked, but for the plain cloth sacks hung at their waists and all the times striking their backs with whips,

each crack and tear meant to atone for the sins of mankind. In London, they performed their apocalyptic street show night after night in front of the old St Paul's Cathedral, with its great spire towering over them. What must it have felt like to stand in the crowd and watch? What did it feel like to live through this apocalypse? Through a time when the living struggled to bury the dead and the more of the grave seemed ready to swallow the world. Can I just say, I would have eye rolled so hard at Flagellants. I would have just been like, babe, I'm going home.

I'm getting my mead. This is not happening for me. This is too much. This They're making it about them. Helen, what exactly were these... I was going to pass too harsh a judgment. What exactly were flagellants? Yeah, the flagellants were... So they arrived in England from Flanders and they came in about September 1349, Michaelmas, so late September, and Maddie was right in her narrative. They wore this small loin cloth. I think the idea was that they were experiencing pain and the agony of Christ, but they also wore a hood and that was painted front and back with a red cross, so kind of like a weird, like, crusader look at the same time. And they carried a whip in their right hand, which had three thongs on it.

And each thong had a knot with something. These were like DIY thongs. I mean, when you say thongs as well, let's imagine knots, not like the things. Helen, DIY thongs is going to be the title of this episode. You do realize that. It's a DIY thong. Everyone's going to go away and go, I can do a DIY thong. People will be like, why have they lost their minds? DIY thongs is not the thing. I mean, at this point, whatever everything goes. We all did weird stuff in the pandemic.

Yes, we did. Oh, we did. It had something sharp attached to it, so things people could find, be that nails or needles. And they'd stick it through the middle of the knot, and so it stuck out on the other side. And as they walked, one after the other, they would whip themselves. They'd strike themselves with these whips on their naked bodies. And then three times during this processionion the men would prostrate themselves on the ground and make the shape of the cross with their bodies as someone else walked over them, lashing their backs with his own whip. Anthony is so unimpressed.

No, I'm just like, go home guys, get a hobby. I know there's a plague and you probably can, you have to socially distance, whatever, but Christ on a bike, not this. It's pretty intense. I mean imagine watching that, as you said, you know, it would have been terrifying. And it was this extreme act of penance and penitence. And it was claimed they did this every single night. So it was like a nightly ritual. And they weren't a new phenomenon. This is something that had been practiced before. Across Europe, ritualized self-flogging was quite a, quite fervently practiced in response to plague.

And it wasn't only just men. So in Northern and Central Italy, it was all local people. So over nine days, these people in Italy would process traveling through regions, wearing head-to-toe white robes and they would shout peace and mercy and they were communities who were moving and spreading plague as they went and so it was But it was this idea that they had in some way the pervading our theme was this was God's wrath because this is a time when people our theme was this was God's wrath. Because this is a time when people, you know, people really did believe that everything that happened to them, they were fatalistic. Everything that happened was God's intention. It was divine mercy or it was divine wrath. And you

lived in this environment of extreme piety and penance. And that was just the norm. So when something comes out of the blue that feels biblical, you're going to attribute that to this greater power that really is such a huge part and dictates your everyday life and existence. I hesitate to make this direct comparison, but I do think there's a little something in this. If we think back to the pandemic that we lived through, before everyone cancels me, just bear with me, think back to the practice that a lot of people partook in of going out and bashing the pots and pans and shouting for the NHS.

And whilst I don't think that's on the same level of self-righteousness as the flagellants, I think there's something there about a feeling of needing to come out into a communal space and express something of what is happening on a community level, whether that's a religious level in terms of the medieval world or whether it's just a more social thing in the COVID pandemic, and enacting something, something that's choreographed, something that brings people together, that causes a spectacle at a time when everyone is isolating, everyone's removing into their own domestic space. I mean, you talked about Joan heading to the castle for safety, and we know that people in medieval England either removed themselves into

their home or abandoned their homes entirely, and entire villages were lost to this and just stood empty. And I think there's something powerful and interesting about what the Flagellants are doing, albeit in a somewhat from our modern perspective slightly ridiculous way. I think there is something there about that sort of public choreography. way. I think there is something there about that sort of public choreography. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think, so I've done a bit of work on emotions and emotions around this period and how we can try and get an idea of how people were feeling. And I think even though we shouldn't make contemporary, you know, modern comparisons, because our experience was very different to people who were living through this. However, human emotion, I believe, is a universal thing. Emotions like fear and grief and piety or this sense of guilt. I think that those are

feelings that people had in the past, in the 14th century. And that feeling that we talked about a bit earlier about hearing on the radio that the COVID pandemic is appearing, it's left China, it's spreading. There was a sense, a growing sense of fear. And I think, how does one react in fear? We often seek comfort in togetherness. We seek some kind of sense of unity

and collective safety, as you said, with the bashing of the pots and pans. And I think in regard to godliness and piety and looking to the church, because you always look to a priest to sing mass for your soul or to be there for you to give you the last rites. I mean, something we can talk about, that people didn't have access to that in the same way. And I think that this unimaginable fear, watching your loved ones die around you, that you might

be next. I think piety was one of the only ways that people living through plague could make sense of its devastation. And I don't think that is something we can laugh at or sneer at or go, OK, because actually, I think it makes a lot of sense that people would respond in that way. Taking all of that into consideration, does that mean that there is a change in

relationship to death and how people are understanding death at this point? Because it's around them, it's everywhere. Yeah. I mean, plague changed the world after 1348. And it should also be clear that wasn't the only wave. People had to endure waves of plague that came every few years up until really into the 16th centuries. Well, there's obviously the famous plague, 1665,

in the 17th century. People endured it for centuries, and it became something that people lived with. And so with that, particularly into the late 14th century and to the early 15th century, the whole concept of memento mori became such a thing. So memento mori means literally, literally, remember you will die, is this visual reminder all around you that death is nigh. I mean, it must have been quite a bleak existence, but people started to take death and dying very seriously. And it became this way of expressing oneself as well through creative output, through literature and prose and art. And it really produced quite remarkable things. One of the things that I find deeply

affecting, because I live in Cambridge and in 1352 the Corpus Christi College, which is next to St. Benet's Church, was formed. A guild had already been formed there in the height of the plague. Because they were so overwhelmed by the death and the number of souls that they had to pray for, an extra guild was formed in order to be able to support the dying into the afterlife. So it was like a perpetual chantry that was formed. And later on, a few years later, an entrance between Corpus Christi College and St. Benett's, next to St. Benett's Church was created and it still is where the scholars walk through today. And you have this beautiful old church, 11th century church next to it. That walkway was created over a plague pit where people were buried

in couples or people were buried, three people on top of each other. And what it was is it held the recent dead in heart and in mind. It was not a coincidence that they chose to make that their path, their pathway, their entry and exit. It was not void of meaning. It was designed very purposefully to create this constant reminder of those who had been lost to plague and the inescapable fate of the living. So it was binding the spiritual world to the physical

by prayer, by earth, and by stone. And that, in a very basic level, was memento mori. And I find that incredibly moving, this idea that it was this united realm in some way. It was the thin space became even thinner just after the Black Death. And that that space, as it's expressed in architecture, is still at the heart of a city today and is still part of the urban, the fabric of the urban environment.

The other thing to say, I think, here, Helen, is that bodies and death were so proximate to people, not just the threat of dying, but the actual physical reality that people were confronted with of illness and the dead body and what you needed to do to dispose of those bodies, whether it was a mass grave and sending the spirit on its way, but also sending the physical body on its way.

And something that's always fascinated me about, you're just sort of talking about the legacies of the Black Death, are the cadaver tombs that exist. These incredible marble or at least stone carved tombs that you get in cathedrals and churches across Britain that are not representations of the dead peacefully as they would have been in life, but in a state of decomposition that is quite shocking if you're not prepared for it, right? What are they about? They're so bizarre. So they are a brilliant example of this concept of memento mori. And they are otherwise known as cadaver tombs, they're also known as transe tombs as well. And I think there's one, there's a particular one that's very famous, I think it's in Lincoln Cathedral, and that is a beautiful example. And it's the, you have the, you know, the body of the dead person

sculpted above, usually sculpted out of marble or stone. And then beneath, it's like an open, marble or stone, and then beneath, it's like an open casket, imagine, beneath this body in this box-like tomb, you see this skeleton or a body that is in the process of decomposition and sometimes you even see the worms crawling over the body. And it is this very physical idea and impression of death. You know, it's this idea that death and the body and the putrefying nature of decomposition is part of our earthly and human existence. If that makes sense, it's like in some way, it's a very powerful religious symbol, because it represents the physicality of the human body, rather than the very spiritual sense, this idea of the soul, it represents this idea that we will die. That human body will die and it will go into a state of decomposition.

Yeah, absolutely. It's really intense. You will die, you will die one day and you will die one day. The joyfulness of the Black Death. Yeah. Oh no, I'm never dying. I've decided not to, sorry. Oh no, I take great comfort in the fact that I'll die someday. At some point it'll happen. That's very morbid. I don't mean that. I will say, Anthony, you do talk about dying a lot. It's a topic of conversation between us. A significant amount more than it should be. Yeah. I think I might just be Irish. We live cheek by jowl with it. Just bringing the mood down.

I think that's actually quite a healthy attitude. It's something that, you know, the people living in this period, and you see it with these transi tombs or the art that came out of the period afterwards, it does demonstrate this idea of, I wouldn't say comfort, but acceptance and creating something with that knowledge. But there's all sorts of things that came out of this idea of the body and the plague body. And it wasn't just the transe tombs.

Like horror stories came out of the post-plague bodies. We've spoken about some of that emotional impact, Helen, that you're talking about the fear, the sadness, the grief that people are experiencing because of the proliferation of death at this time. And I was not aware of this poem, despite the fact that in my notes it's described as one of the most famous poems in the English language. This is new to me. But Maddie is going to give us a little insight into what I believe is a very touching poem.

The poem Pearl is one of the great English poems, though the identity of its author is unknown to us now. It takes place within a dream and deals with the loss of a young child. Hollow with loss and harrowed by pain, the poet stumbles into a green garden of ginger, gromwell and gillyflower. This place is at the centre of all their sorrow, for it is here that their precious daughter died, slipping through their fingers to the black soil beneath their feet.

Now they mourn with a broken heart for that priceless pearl without a spot. So much about the way this poem is written sounds foreign to us now alien, yet its very strangeness magnifies its power. In its lines we sense the unsayable grief of a parent who has lost a child. And yet, there is a more sinister undercurrent. Again and again, the poem returns to one word, spot. The spot that ruined the pearl, the spot that blotted what was flawless and is now lost. In that dark lesion on a perfect surface, are we seeing the Black Death and its pestilent boils? Can we use this poem to get closer to the pain and loss felt by so many?

I'll tell you what, I'm gonna throw to you, Helen, on this because obviously you'll know more than me, but whether or not it is about the Black Death, it's a real example of what you were talking about in that emotional thing. You can connect to those words so easily. That gets right into the heart of it. But let's talk historically for a second and try and take some of the emotion out of it. Do you think this is about the Black Death?

Is that what this is describing or do you think it's something else? I think it is. There are different hypotheses when it comes to Pearl and I think a lot of, I'm not an English scholar, but reading it myself and reading some of the literature around it, I do think that it is about the Black Death and whether you can attribute that to the narrator's own experience or the general mood of the era about loss and grief and pervading death. In 1361 there was a particularly virulent strain of plague that was dubbed the children's plague, which I find really moving. And it killed a lot of young children. And I did wonder

whether perhaps the reference to spot and the child being very young had something to do with that particular wave of plague. It's just also the repetition of the word spot. And that is how people identified these buboes and these plague spots. And so for me, in a 50-year span where plague is so prevalent and it keeps returning, it seems very likely that this is written about a child who has been lost to plague. That's my reading of it. But like all art, it's all subjective. And so people will take different readings of it. For my book, I have used this poem as a way of trying to access emotion and grief around plague. Because one thing that historians don't really do when it comes to plague is it's very analytical. And there's a little really on emotional connection to that loss and feeling and how people grieved.

And I think Pearl is a wonderful example of grief. And for anybody who's experienced grief, it goes straight to the core and you feel connected immediately with this 14th century writer. And it just shows that some of these human emotions just transcend time. And that's why I wanted to use it because I just thought that it was such a unique poem about death and feeling around death and this idea of speaking to that loved one in that very visual space. And it also fills the tropes of the dream visions that you see in this period.

Chaucer, the book of the Duchess is also about grief and that begins with this dream vision. So there is an element of those literary tropes that you see with Pearl, but I think for in relation to loss and grief, it feels like Pearl is a good example to touch on that. You're giving a really clear idea there of this switch potentially in the way people are thinking about death, describing death, experiencing death from the living side of things. You know, five million people, this is a lot of people.

Do we know if this changed how people express their feelings or how they talked about their feelings and their emotions? You mentioned kind of the emotional side of this before and studying the emotions, the history of emotions. Do we see a switch post-Black Death? Yeah, so it's more this sense of memento mori and I think it's most clear in the art that appears and the literature that appears. It's you know poetry like pearl but one of my favorite altarpieces is in the V&A and is a scene of the apocalypse and it was painted by Master Bertram. It's this scene of the apocalypse and it's a series of panels. It depicts the moment of the seventh seal being broken and this chaos being unleashed

on earth. You know, the horsemen of the apocalypse, fire and hell and damnation and fury. And I think it really gives the sense of what people were afraid of and what people thought was genuinely possible. And it was painted by a master Bertram von Minden. And it came out of Hamburg in Germany and it's this beautiful altarpiece, beautiful but strikingly terrifying. And it's 45 wooden panel scenes.

And it's the revelation of St. John the Divine. And that's otherwise known as the apocalypse. So the first panel marks the revelation of St John the Divine and that's otherwise known as the Apocalypse. So the first panel marks the beginning of anarchy and that's when the seventh seal is opened and the angels stand prepared to inflict unbearable suffering upon the living, they've got their trumpets and then what follows is this fire and this death and destruction. He wasn't the only craftsman to be painting these sorts of scenes after 1348 into the 15th century. Another example, which I use a lot because it's one of my favourite places in the country, is this little church in Pickering in North

Yorkshire. It's the church of St Peter and St Paul. I've been there a few times. It's one of the rare examples of some of the original paintings that used to be all over church walls before the Reformation. And it was vibrant and bright and I think it was discovered in the 19th century when the plaster was coming off and then they started to chip away and they found these beautiful frescoes all over the wall. And these show scenes like the biblical scenes that decorate the walls. And that was mostly means of educating illiterate people who obviously, you know, they couldn't read the Bible because it was in Latin, it was only preached to them.

But it was showing some normative scenes like the St. George slaying the dragon and the martyrdom of St. Edmund and the seven corporeal acts of mercy. But the most dramatic and the martyrdom of St Edmund and the seven corporeal acts of mercy, but the most dramatic and the scene that takes up the most space in the church is this depiction of descent into hell. You can Google it, it's incredible. There's this flaming mouth of a dragon that reveals the many dead descending into this mouth desperate for redemption from this eternal damnation. I think that the mood of the era in regards to how people considered death was largely anxiety, insecurity, and I think the good dollop of pessimism. And, yay.

Not a great note to end on, Helen. Give us something better. So I'm going to, but I was just about to add what you did get after all of this loss was this great societal leveling. And how much that happened is up for debate still. It's this continual debate and it's quote unquote the debate over the golden age which was this time that came after these waves of plague mostly into the late 1350s, 1360s, 70s, 80s. But it was a period where you really saw the end of serfdom. People were able to better themselves. The government tried their damnedest to stop them doing that. You must only wear shoes this length. You're not allowed to wear shoes this length because you only really

come from peasant stock. Or they were not allowed to wear... It's the Sumtree laws. They weren't allowed to wear certain colors and furs. But you saw the rise of the merchant class having more power. Hierarchies were imbalanced. And as a result, much later you have things like the Peasants' Revolt, et cetera. But it was a great levelling and it did give people opportunities. There were periods where women had to step into more roles. You saw women as armorers because so many men died, and particularly in the second wave of plague, lots of men died because they're working out in the fields. And so women had to work more, they had to do traditionally men's roles.

And so yeah, it has been considered as a golden age in many respects. It was a time where some of the greater societal unfairness that existed in the 14th century ceased to exist in the same way. I see behind you, Helen, there's a dog wandering around, so we won't keep you too much longer, because my owner probably is scrabbling at the door right now to try and get out in a dog walk. But just before we let you go, tell us about this new book. When is it out? And what can we expect from it? Tell us everything you can. It is going to be out next May, and it's called Septid Isle. And it's a new history of the 14th century. So it starts in 1307

with the death of Edward the first who is this warrior king super famous people who've watched Braveheart will know exactly who I'm talking about. And then it ends with the deposition and death of Richard the second and the idea of the book is that I am telling the story of the 14th century through the age of the last Plantagenets, which makes them great characters to be able to tell this story through. Well, if you want to check out our back catalogue, then you can do wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a five star review so other people can discover us and watch out for

Helen's new book when it comes out in spring. I know Maddie and I will definitely be grabbing a copy of that when it comes out. Thank you for listening as ever and until next time, we'll see you soon. Canada may be known for its landscapes and friendly people, but beneath the surface lies a darker side of crime, history and the paranormal. Since 2017, the award-winning Dark Poutine podcast has explored the shadowy corners of the Great White North and beyond, delivering chilling tales from a uniquely Canadian perspective. Hosted by Mike Brown and Matthew Stockton with over 300 episodes and fresh releases every Monday, Dark Poutine is your weekly ticket to the creepier side of Canada. Listen to Dark Poutine on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most meal replacements are rough on sensitive stomachs, not Sperry.

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