GOING INTO LOCKDOWN

Helen Carr explores the measures used across the centuries to curb the spread of the deadliest disease in human history

- HELEN CARR

'In May 1348, a ship glided into the port of Melcombe Regis in England, carrying a disease from the east that had already ravaged the western world. It had killed men, women and children in their thousands quickly and mercilessly. This was the bubonic plague, identified by the blackening 'buboes' that formed within the joint area of an infected person - the groin or armpit were the most common places. These were accompanied by bodily aches, cold, lethargy and a high fever. When the infection got into the bloodstream it effectively poisoned the blood, leading to probable death. Some survived the infection, but most people died within days, sometimes hours. This wave of bubonic plague became known then as the Great Pestilence - or later, as the Black Death.

Edward III, king of England, had to act quickly to protect the public from infection

The plague at Tournai, Belgium, as depicted in Gilles Li Muisis's annals of 1349

WIDESPREAD DEVASTATION 

By November 1348 the disease had reached London, and by New Year's Day 1349 around 200 bodies a day were being piled into mass graves outside the city. Henry Knighton, an Augustinian monk, witnessed the devastation of the Black Death in England: "There was a general mortality throughout the world... sheep and oxen strayed through the fields and among the crops and there was none to drive them off or collect them, but they perished in uncounted numbers... for lack of shepherds... After the Pestilence many buildings fell into total ruin for lack of inhabitants; similarly many small villages and hamlets became desolate and no homes were left in them, for all those who had dwelt anthem [sic] were dead."

A statuette of Joan of England on the tomb of her father, Edward III. The princess died of the Black Death in 1348, aged just 14