EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE BLACK DEATH

Professor John Hatcher answers keys questions about the global spread, symptoms and long-term impact of plague

- John Hatcher

Q: When did the Black Death start and end?

A: The Great Pestilence is thought to have started in 1346 in the high steppes of Mongolia or eastern China. It then went on a massive circuit of the known world, moving largely eastwards and southwards, across the Mediterranean, working its way down into north Africa, and up through Italy and Spain. In England it arrived in Dorset in the summer of 1348. By the end of 1349 it had spread throughout the rest of England and Ireland and into Scotland. Thereafter the plague moved northwards into Scandinavia and then eastwards, arriving in Russia in 1352-53. In just seven years it had traversed the whole of the known world.

The plague spread at two speeds, moving at its fastest as it was carried long distances across the sea, but much more slowly as it made its way across land. The relentless progress of the Black Death across England has been carefully tracked through an abundance of local records, which show that the length of time the plague stayed in any community depended on its size, with deaths from plague occurring for no more than three months in the average village, although for appreciably longer in large towns and cities, before dwindling and finally ceasing. This first and most ferocious wave of plague had disappeared from England by late 1349, but the same disease returned with a major visitation in 1361-62, and again and again, albeit with slowly diminishing force and contracting scale, for the ensuing decades and centuries.

Q: What was the death rate?