Our illustration imagines the Suffolk woman Olivia Cranmer, who carved out a successful career managing the family plot of land in the wake of the Black Death
Accompanies the new four-part series Lucy Worsley Investigates, due to air on BBC Two in mid-May
Life after the Black Death
How plague opened up new horizons for a Suffolk widow
"Why should people study the Black Death?" I asked historian John Hatcher. "Because," he laughed, "it'll make you feel better about coronavirus."
When the bubonic plague swept through England in 1348-49, it wiped out something like half of the population. Giovanni Boccaccio's classic account of plague symptoms describes how first "swellings in the groin or under the armpits, some egg-shaped, others the size of an apple" would appear. Victims then "began to find dark blotches on their arms and thighs. These were signs that someone would die."
The rich were more likely to survive, hiding away on country estates where the risk of infection was lower. Priests, however, had terrible survival rates because, as they heard the confessions of the dying, they were in the direct line of fire.
Professor Hatcher has studied the Black Death's rampage through one particular Suffolk village, Walsham le Willows, and led me to the story of one particular woman, Olivia Cranmer, which had rather a surprising ending.
In the Suffolk Archives in Bury St Edmunds, the records of the court of Walsham le Willows survive in an astonishing state of preservation. They allow us to track the effects of the pandemic on Olivia's family, whose name still survives in the part of the village called Cranmer Green.
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