Black Death Part 3

Plagues with Dr. Keith

This concluding episode of the Black Death series traces the plague's relentless spread from France through England, Germany, and into even the most remote

Key takeaways

• The plague's spread was so extensive it reached Greenland, proving that geographical isolation offered no protection.
• Economic shifts included the dissolution of feudalism as labor shortages gave peasants unprecedented bargaining power.

Main topics

• Spread of the Black Death across Europe
• Collapse of Feudalism and economic shifts

Notable quotes

Human life is constant fear.

Conclusion

The Black Death acted as a violent catalyst that reset the foundations

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to part three of the Black Death series. We conclude this series by following the plague from northern France to England to Germany, Central Europe and beyond. A continent already on its knees, watching the horizon for the next black flag to rise. The reach of the pestilence was extensive, relentless, indifferent to borders or belief, even touching the remote, frozen island of Greenland, where isolation itself proved. No sanctuary. Speaker 1 (0:31) Fear would be the catalyst of the most extreme human reactions, from the bizarre, blood-soaked fervor of the flagellants to the hateful pogroms unleashed against the Jews. Over 100 years before the onset of the Black Death, Pope Innocent III had already diagnosed the human condition with chilling precision. Human life is constant fear. He could not have known how prophetic these words would become, as we will see. Fear was the currency of the Black Death, traded, hoarded, and spent in acts of both desperate faith and unthinkable cruelty. From a political, social, economic, and cultural standpoint, the plague would transform Europe utterly. It expedited the dissolution of feudalism, a system centuries in the making brought low in a matter of years, and enhanced the rise of the craftsmen and other elements of the medieval middle class. In the ashes of the old order, the seeds of a new political entity, the nation-state would be fertilized, and the conception of modern man would quietly, irrevocably begin. Let us begin. Speaker 1 (2:14) Within a given region, the plague could complete its extermination within three to six months before evaporating, vanishing as suddenly as it came, leading the living to wonder if it might return. In bigger cities, though, where people lived crushed together in tighter proximity, the pestilence found a way to endure. It could hibernate through the cold months, lying dormant, patient, before flourishing again in the warmth of spring. when rats began to venture forth from their relative isolation and the pestilence would sweep through its human hosts for another handful of merciless months. While the data is spotty, it appears that women were more susceptible to Yersinia, the plague bacteria, given their increased exposure to fleas as a result of being more housebound than their male counterparts. Victims in part of the very domestic spaces meant to shelter them. And yet, in a detail almost too strange to believe, as common as fleas were in a medieval household, they went essentially unmentioned in the record. Rats only rarely warranted a comment. The very agents of annihilation moved unseen, unnamed, unsuspected, surely a sad irony, and perhaps the plague's coolest joke. Surging northward from Paris, the plague hit more than France, and the scourge continued without mercy. A French contemporary Lac-Ravier notes of a cemetery in Rouen that bodies decayed and putrefied in the pallets where they had to breathe their last. The dead denied even the dignity of burial, left to rot where they fell. Burial space was becoming prime real estate and clergy, those meant to usher souls into the next world, were dying off in droves, leaving the dead with no one left to pray over them. Divine wrath had to be appeased. So the city of Yuan banned all activities that could be offensive to God. Gambling, cursing, and drinking were noted in particular as if silence and sobriety alone might turn back the tide of corpses. the coastal province of normandy was hit hardest in the summer of thirteen forty eight winter had slowed the peg's quarrel northward but only delayed the inevitable it held breath before the next blow fell as the plague left its all too familiar stamp black flags were raised in church towers throughout the province Speaker 1 (4:48) The meaning of this practice is not recorded, but it hardly needs to be. A silent, fluttering language of death, understood by anyone who saw it rise. And yet, in the face of all this, defiance took strange forms. In an unspecified northern French village, people were observed dancing to horns and drums. When asked why, the villagers declared that while their neighbors were dying daily all around them, Their own village had yet to suffer, and they believed they could keep the petulance at bay by the jollity that is in us. That is why we dance. Whether triumph or desperation, one cannot say. Perhaps in the shadow of an invisible killer, there was no difference between the two. The plague surged across the English Channel and invaded English shores, indifferent to water as it had been to walls. A Welsh dirge gives a haunting summation of the island's experience. Death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a ruthless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit. It is seething, terrible, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a painful, angry knob. Great is its seething like a burning cinder. a grievous thing of ashy color. Even in poetry, the horror bleeds through. And yet, astonishingly, some on the island believed themselves immune, untouchable even, and sought to turn the pestilence to their advantage. The Scots, long-time rivals of their southern English neighbors, were mobilizing for invasion, gambling that England's suffering was their opportunity. The winter of 1348-1349 only delayed the plague's advance northward into Scotland, and in that narrow window the Scots were, by report, laughing at their enemies, already raiding northern England, tasting victory before a single sword was drawn. Then the Black Death struck Scotland with its typical ferocity, and the laughter stopped. Scottish military ambitions were dashed in an instant, a clear and brutal reminder that the Reaper left no one unaccounted for, friend or foe, hunter or foe. were hunted. While the devastation of the English countryside and urban centers mirrored the same grim pattern seen across the rest of Europe, medieval English documents stress in particular the staggering casualties among the clergy and among sheep. Despite their reluctance to hear confessions or perform spiritual duties for plague victims, an officiant of the Archbishop of Canterbury reports that English priests turned away from the care of their benefices from fear of death. the clergy proved just as vulnerable to infection as the peasant parishioners they abandoned. Not even rank offered true protection, though higher-ranked clergy did, on the whole, survive at somewhat better rates than their lesser brethren. Within a single year, beginning in August 1348, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Stratford, died, and two subsequent appointed successors also succumbed to the Black Death. By August 1349, an entire line of the church's highest office swallowed whole. So severe was the shortage of priests that an English bishop granted permission for lay people to make a confession to each other, even to women, a truly desperate measure given the rigid cultural and social order of the time, and a small telling crack in the world as it had always been. Speaker 1 (8:30) Wool was a valuable English commodity, the lifeblood of the rural economy, and the plague would strike at that too, as Yersinia cut down sheep all throughout the English countryside. The canon of Leicester Abbey, Henry Knighton, chronicles the death of 5,000 sheep in a single pasture, their bodies so corrupted by the plague that neither beast nor bird would touch them. a landscape so poisoned that even scavengers refused it. To say that medieval sanitation standards were poor would be a kind understatement. The streets of London, like other cities throughout Europe in the 14th century, were rife with sewage, a slow-simmering hazard long before the plague arrived to exploit it. Edward III himself lamented that the streets were foul with human feces and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing. especially in this time of infectious disease. A grim paradox took hold. To remove plague-ridden corpses from already filth-choked streets meant exposing more of the already decimated population to the very disease they sought to escape. There was no clean path forward, only degrees of risk. Some aristocrats took more extensive action still, choosing to burn their own villages to the ground rather than let the plague take them house by house. the village of noesley among them and in a strange twist of history the descendants of that same aristocrat still dwell in noesley hall to this day a family's legacy built quite literally on the ashes of a desperate gamble against death itself Saint Baroque was a patron saint of dogs and indolids, often invoked against the plague. His image raised in prayer, his name whispered by the desperate. But saints, it seemed, could not hold back what was coming. While divine retribution was attributed as the cause of the Black Death, the divine could not hold a candle to human malice. Bartolo di Sassafarato, a common Italian law professor of the time, claimed that the hostility of