Dan Snow's History Hit - The Black Death

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

In this podcast, Dan Snow is joined by Professor Mark Bailey, High Master of St Paul's School, London and Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of East Anglia to delve into the topic of The Black Death. They discuss how it emerged and spread throughout the world, what impact it had on society and how it would return every few decades over the 400 years that followed.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now, as you'll know, I am doing History Hit Live on YouTube, on the Timeline channel on YouTube, three times a week during this lockdown. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 4pm UK time, 8am Pacific and 11am Eastern time. So head over to Timeline and watch those. We've had Susanna Lipscomb on, we've had Dan Jones, we've got Mary Beard coming up, we've got all sorts of wonderful people. And the first one that went out is one that's proved very, very popular. There's people watching it with Professor Mark Bailey. He's a professor at the University of East Anglia.

And he is a specialist in, you guessed it, the Black Death. We decided we'd start with the Black Death. It's what people seem to be talking about and making dodgy historical comparisons to so we thought we'd go straight to the man himself and find out about the scale of the black death which initially swept through Europe from western Asia in the middle of the 14th century but also its impact on communities its aftermath economic social and cultural and political changes that followed in its way can try and stimulate some thought about how the current crisis might change the world that we live in. So enjoy this. If you want to watch this one or any of them, they're all available on the Timeline YouTube channel. Go and check them out, as is me talking about my favourite historical movies.

That was an Easter Bank Holiday Monday special, so go and check that one out and disagree with them if you will like everyone seems to have done if you want to watch even more historical documentaries if you want to listen to all these episodes of the podcast go to History It it's the new digital history channel it's like Netflix just for history lots of people going up there now use the code pod1 pod1 and you'll get a month for free and then one month for just one pound, euro or dollar. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy Professor Mark Bailey. In this episode, I'm going to be focusing, perhaps appropriately, on the Black Death, a pandemic that swept across Eurasia in the 14th century and caused enormous casualties and saw huge change in its aftermath as well.

I'm very, very lucky. I'm joined by Professor Mark Bailey. He's just delivered the very prestigious Ford Lectures. Obviously, the university has got a book out on this at the moment. He is exactly the right man to talk to. Mark, thank you very much for coming on this special, experimental, live podcast YouTube episode. It's a pleasure, Dan. People will have heard of the Black Death. Can you just give me the outlines? When and where did it emerge and how fast did it spread? The Black Death occurred in the middle of the 14th century, and we know from eyewitness reports, who must have seen people dying in the late 1340s, that the symptoms were buboes, pussy buboes appearing in the lymph nodes, and blackness under the skin, which is effectively necrosis. Tissues are dying. And we also know from various sources about 30%

of the European population, perhaps 50% of the English population died. It spread very, very quickly and spread throughout the year as well. So it didn't seem to stop according to the seasons. Did it emerge in the east and spread? It did. We have a sense that it probably emerged from a reservoir of pathogens, which we think was Y. pestis, which is plague, somewhere around Mongolia, Tibet, western China, and it spread in the 1330s and gradually came westwards throughout Europe. I guess, unlike today, when there's plane travel, huge globalised communities, was it a little bit slower?

Were there counts of it as it was sort of progressing across the landmass? Historians have been poring over documents from different parts of Eurasia for the last 10 or 20 years and have been able to reconstruct how it spread. It's probably reached the Middle East sometime in 1346. And then in 1347, it simply explodes across the Mediterranean littoral, which means that it's probably been carried in boats, probably Italian, Venetian, Genoan galleys. It gets as far as the Balearic Islands by the end of 1347. So in that year, it is spreading hundreds of kilometers. And the interesting thing is that modern plague doesn't move very much during the winter, and it spreads much more slowly.

So there's a significant difference between the speed, the seasonality, even the mortality of the medieval Black Death and modern plague. And that difference has caused historians a good degree of confusion in the recent past. Yeah, worth remembering, of course, the plague still exists in certain places on the planet now. It hasn't entirely been stamped out like something like smallpox. Talk to me, I know this was a time also of climate change. Do you think that had any impact on the transmission of the plague? One of the big questions for historians is why did the worst pandemic in recorded history suddenly explode across the known world? And in the past sort of 20 years, they've got a much better sense that there's a

number of factors, chance events, working in tandem to create this extraordinary catastrophe. to create this extraordinary catastrophe. One of the things is there's high levels of population across Asia and Europe, high levels of malnutrition and poverty. Significant amount of trade is going on at this period between the Far East and Europe. And so there is transmission through travellers and merchants moving across the continent. But most importantly, and perhaps intriguingly of all, something very, very strange is happening to the climate in the early 14th century. There's a sudden increase of storminess and significant variations from year to year in temperature, in precipitation, very rainy one year, very dry the

next, very hot, very cold. And most remarkable of all, the Black Death moving across the known world between 1347 and about 1351 coincides with the coldest snap of the last millennium. It's extraordinarily cold. And scientists have even discovered that the Justinian Plague of the 530s was also coincidental upon a serious reduction in the temperature of the world climate. So as well as the plague, there would have been things like crop failure as well. I mean, this just sounds like a terrible time to be alive. In 1349, plague hit England. The Black Death hit England and the harvest failed. The harvest failed in 1350. It failed in 1351. Wait

for it. It failed in 1352. It is the sole example in the second millennium of four back-to-back catastrophic crop failures. And at the same time, we know that, for instance, the price of fuel and the price of salt rockets. And what that is indicative of is extreme cold and a lack of solar radians. I understand the scholarship has kind of moved around on the importance of rats and whether or they were to blame. Yes. The high mortality rates in the middle of the 14th century, up to 50% of the population dying, the speed with which it travels and the time of the year,

throughout the year, means that the Black Death, which we traditionally assume is plague, but is not behaving like modern plague. And so that created some confusion amongst historians and scientists who wondered whether, in fact, it was some other disease. And that debate was actually resolved about 10 years ago with advances in DNA technology, which was able to identify, would you believe, from the dental pulp of plague victims from seven plague pits throughout Europe, they were able to identify that the offending pathogen in the Black Death was indeed Wysinia pestis. It was plague, but it's plague behaving

in a very different way to modern plague. So it's a different strain. And there's a sense, given the speed of the spread, that rather than being just a disease of rats, which it tends to be in the 20th century, it was more broadly a disease of rodents, of mammals. It transmits to humans and it's perfectly possible that either human fleas, human lice or even droplet infection between humans is the main mode of transmission of this particular disease. Because what we do know, and we have reconstructed, is that it's travelling down the main arterial routeways of medieval Europe. It's humans, not rats, it's humans that are transmitting this disease. Was there anywhere in Europe that managed to avoid entirely the arrival of the plague?

that managed to avoid entirely the arrival of the plague? In England, we've got some wonderful sources that show how this plague is spreading and deaths. And for 30 years, I've been trying to find a single place that was missed in 1348-49, and I found one single place. So in England, hardly anywhere missed. There is a sense that parts of Bohemia, bits of Germany and Poland might have missed in the main epidemic at the end of the 1340s, early 1350s. But the thing about this disease is that it kept coming back. It came back in 1361-62. It came back at the end of the 1360s. And those places

that missed it first time around certainly didn't miss second or third time around. Did it affect all ages equally? And how about social classes? Did the rich suffer as much as the poor? Well, we once thought that this killed indiscriminately, and certainly contemporaries felt that this was a very different disease that afflicted humanity equally. But from different sets of sources, we know that the death rates amongst the nobility were lower. Perhaps about a quarter of them died, and that's really because they must have known that it was coming elderly disproportionately. And younger people seem to have survived better. Whether they caught it and recovered or didn't catch it, we simply cannot know. But we know that the over 50s died disproportionately high.

disproportionately high. But here's the irony, 1361-62, the second great plague epidemic, which is probably the second worst health catastrophe of the last millennium, but pales into significance compared to the first outbreak, is often described by contemporaries as the plague of children, that it seems as though they then died disproportionately high during the second epidemic. This idea that it keeps coming back and it's not a single challenge that society has to face. I mean, how many waves of this were? This disease, and it is the same disease, of that we're certain, returns on another five occasions throughout Europe in the 14th century alone. In England in the 15th century, it recurs on another dozen occasions. And the final outbreak in England is, of course, the famous outbreak of 1665. But it's in France until the early 18th century. Of course, it becomes less virulent, it becomes less complete

in its geographical spread, it kills fewer people on each of those subsequent visitations, but it's here. This is a golden age of pathogens that lasts for about three centuries. And one of the great unanswered questions is, why does it disappear? And we don't quite know why, because it's a complex interaction of both human response, humans can take steps to reduce its immunity, and perhaps then were handing on a genetic immunity to subsequent generations. Plus, it's all to do also with the density of rodents, the density of the vectors, the fleas, and so on. But also, epidemiologically, there is a tendency for pathogens to become avirulent over time. If they're too successful, they kill their hosts, and there's no host left for them to infect. So there's a tendency for mutation towards more avirulent strains

of a given pathogen. So you put all those together, and it disappears from England in the middle of the 17th century. But as you rightly said earlier, it's back. It is present currently on five of the seven continents of the world. It's something that I always associate with being a sort of disease of the 14th century, but I remember in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth was in her almost final year of her reign,

there was an outbreak in England then. It's extraordinary. Did people's responses tend to change over those centuries? in her almost final year of her reign, there was an outbreak in England then. It's extraordinary. Did people's responses tend to change over those centuries? The outbreak in London in 1665, so vividly described by Pepys, was serious and distressing, killed perhaps 5% of the population. But the great example that all British schoolchildren know of the village of Eham in Derbyshire that effectively quarantined itself indicates that societies have learned that isolating people,

isolating the sick and stopping movement, stopping things like markets and trade, stopping people from moving around, has a beneficial effect in restricting the spread of this terrible disease. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft

podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What about other responses in, say, the 14th century? What changes? You can't have 50% mortality in a society without transforming it, presumably. What are the things that you historians have noticed happening in the 14th century? I mean, one of the great challenges is actually burying people at a time when you don't have local authorities or substantial government. And at the same time trying to retrain priests. And much of that is done by private initiative and by charity. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the outbreak in the late 1340s in England is the involvement in the

government in intervening and trying to provide some kind of coordinated response. It's important to remember that governments aren't large in the middle of the 14th century. They don't have a large bureaucracy. They're not particularly well funded. In fact, there's not really a sense of what the role of a government should be at a time of a national pandemic and crisis. at a time of a national pandemic and crisis. But in England, the government intervenes in order to try and stabilize, particularly prices, and also tries to secure the supply of labor. Because if half the population have died, there's a shortage of skilled and unskilled workers. So the government in England on the 18th of June 1349, as the plague is developing throughout the country, pass something called the Ordinance of Labourers

to try and fix prices, to stop them inflating, and to try and make labourers work and to work for a maximum wage, not a minimum wage, a maximum wage for the common good. We don't think of medieval governments being kind of interventionist on that scale, but they really were trying to grapple with this situation. Yes, in some ways they were defining it as they were going along. There was no sense at this stage that central governments should be leading a quarantine response, for instance. In Italy, city states and city governments started to introduce quarantine measures. And that's the first real example of that. The word quarantine comes from the Italian word quarantia, meaning 40 days. So the Italian city-states were the first to try

and isolate the stick and to stop movement. In England, the intervention was much more about social policy and economic policy. And the government establishes the principle for the first time that governments have a role to intervene at time of crises to ensure social stability and to promote the common good of all people. They did so by trying to stop profiteering by making ordinary people work. So their sense of what the common good was is very different from today, but they were articulating that as they went along. The big change in England is that thereafter, the government becomes a standing authority in social policy, and indeed sets the template for other governments around the world.

Should we dwell a little bit more on just what life must have been like during the peak of those outbreaks? I mean, it would have been something that would have brought everything grinding to a halt. You'd have seen it in every direction, I presume. It's really difficult from the sources to get a handle on what it must have liked to have lived through it. They knew it was coming. And you can sense that in some communities, people are making dispositions in order to protect their wealth and so on and so forth and look after potential relatives. There's also some basic prophylactic, sweet smells for instance, and attempts to make sure that burials would be

looked after. But in particular they wanted a proper religious ceremony for burials. And indeed, the experience of 1348-49 meant that many people set up, effectively, communal self-help burial clubs called religious guilds in order to make sure there was somebody there to bury them during the course of a future epidemic. We know that 40% of all land in England changed hands in 1349. It is the greatest single transfer of wealth in one year, because people are dying and heirs are then taking over the land. But throughout this, the most extraordinary thing is that local courts continue to be held, local religious services continue to be held. You get a sense that markets are suspended, a lot of basic trading is

suspended, and that people are relying on community self-help to get through this extraordinary year. But the administrative resilience and the way in which administrative structures coat is just remarkable. And a really good example of that is courts continue to be held. And the only thing that you notice that's different is the handwriting deteriorates. It's almost as if either scribes are rushing or there are less able scribes surviving and less literate scribes as a consequence. But the other thing that is remarkable is that when it comes back in 1361-62, it's serious. But thereafter, these local epidemics, you don't get a sense of any great disruption. You get a sense that communities have learned how to cope with this extraordinary recurrent catastrophe. There are clearly some outbreaks

of local looting, and there are one or two local issues of law and order. But for the most part, law and order seems to have held in most places, and communities held. And I think what it shows is that within a crisis, there is also a sense of humanity, which enables communities to come together and manage whatever is thrown at them. And they adapt. And I think that the message, particularly at the moment, is that communities have faced epidemics and pandemics many, many times before. And reactions are very different, but for the most part, they learn to cope and they emerge stronger at dealing with that aspect of their lives. Well, Mark, I want to finish off by talking about why the plague was not just a catastrophic and tragic event for millions of families, but also how it really set history off on a different path, how it changed

the course of history. What are some of the big changes that you have identified coming off the back of that first great bout of plague in the 14th century? Among the main changes is that the way that people lived changed subtly but importantly. There was a sudden and major reduction in wealth inequality. Essentially, wealth went down the social scale because ordinary people could get land and their labour was suddenly in short supply. And some historians argue that the age of carnivorous Europe starts from the 1350s because the lower orders are now eating meat and dairy produce because they can afford it. There's also a huge jump in ale consumption after the Black Death. And we can document this. So pubs are probably, for the lower orders, are a consequence of the first great outbreak.

And what that is, is people drinking ale as a source of carbohydrates and safe fluid as opposed to water. So it's improved living standards. So those are two fairly major changes. Labour shortages draw women into the workplace to a far greater degree. And in parts of Northwest Europe, that begins to create a change in family structures. So you get small nucleated families with women delaying the age of marriage or not marrying. It's called the North European marriage pattern. And the significance of that

is that it increases the purchasing power of households over the course of the next two or three centuries. Why is that significant? Well, apart from the fact that it is, if you like, Is that significant? Well, apart from the fact that it is, if you like, is the beginnings of girl power, of women in the workforce. But it also means that wealth per capita in Northwest Europe and for a range of other reasons is higher than other parts of the world. So what happens is that the particular institutional, economic and social responses to the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century, then going on over the next two to three centuries, results in greater wealth in Northwest Europe. And as a consequence, it's taking the first tentative steps to modernity, to capitalism. It's called the rise of the West, the great diversions with the East and a little divergence within Europe, that the sort of economic powerhouses shift from Italy and

Spain to Northwest Europe. And it is arguable that we simply would not have come to liberal modernity and current standards of living and technology, had it not been for the Black Death. Mark, thank you so much for joining us on this first live stream. I have learned a huge amount about that gigantic global pandemic. And in many ways, I think you've made me feel a little bit better about what we're going through at the moment for lots of reasons. Just to let everyone know, you've crushed all this expertise into a mighty book. Tell us what that's going to be called. The book is called After the Black Death

and it will look at the responses in England in the later 14th century and it'll be published by Oxford University Press by December. Professor Mark Bailey, thank you very much, dude, for coming on. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review.

It really helps and basically boosts up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour.

Thanks. you