Tywyn and District History Society Forum

‘One thing leads to another’ : the consequences of the Black Death

‘The only sure thing to be said about History is that one thing leads to another’..true of pandems..

BD = greatest single catastrophic event in human history...series of events 1346-53, ‘61, ‘69, ‘71, ‘93 1361 worse than the earlier mass outbreak, contemporaries thought because it killed more children.

Who lived at this time? : Chaucer & Langland, Edward III & Richard II, the rebels John Ball, Wat Tyler & Owain Glyndwr Ch 1340’s-1400, Lan, 1332-86, Ed.reigned 1327-77, Ri II reigned 77-99, JB 38-81, WT 41-81,OG1359-1415

‘One thing leads to another’e.g., other pandemics and epidemics:
(1) the ‘polydemic’ the Conquistadors brought to the native Americans..Died in their millions..More imp…
(2) typhus and cholera in the big cities, esp.London in the mid 19th..Vile smell led to public health response..

The B.D. Bubonic plague with added pneumonic vector..Killed 40-60% of ‘Old’ world population..
All age groups. Entire families. Black not cos of rats, but..Silk to Crimea, Dubrovnik (Ragusa), Venice..Weymouth..Bristol..S-E Wales, NW & NE Wales..Hit Wales in winter of 1348-49..By end of century popn of Wales down from 300th to under 200th. Absurd cures..no germ theory or visibility..

‘One thing leads..another’ Also before the outbreak..Famine weakens resistance. Poor harvest from summer floods..’mortality crises’..1348 exceptionally wet, e.g Glamorgan 1316 Monks & nobles also spread it..

Consequences summary : economic collapse & recovery, social structure and scapegoating of minorities, political turmoil, religious belief and church, psychological – despair, anger, devotion and diversion, ultimately leading to anti-clericalism and the Reformation

Black Death

economic psychological

emptied villages of agric labourers (‘peasants’) and priests e.g.Presteigne,Builth despair (church paintings)

social political religious

many monasteries ruined


‘villeins’ left their lord’s service surviving priests left their parishes
to become wage labourers, now bargaining to go to London.. devotion/ diversion

royal government disallowed wage increases

and piled on taxation to pay for hopeless French war (Poll taxes) anger

Jews, leppers, witches & bishops scapegoated anger

boy king takes over 1377

riots in the countryside, some gentry siding with rebels anger

Peasants Revolt, 1381 -violence in revolt and in its suppression

Glyndwr’s Revolt, 1400-06 Lollardy, Anabaptism.. Prot Reformation


What can be learnt about events almost 700 hundred years ago that has relevance to the present?..”Strikes and challenges society to its foundations”.

As i mentioned at the talk, there is a growing body of evidence that bubonic plague had a catastrophic effect on the neolithic peoples of Western Europe and the UK, below is an article on phys.org (very reputable science news website):
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-ancient-s ... ithic.html

A team of researchers from France, Sweden, and Denmark have identified a new strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague, in DNA extracted from 5,000-year-old human remains. Their analyses, publishing December 6 in the journal Cell, suggest that this strain is the closest ever identified to the genetic origin of plague. Their work also suggests that plague may have been spread among Neolithic European settlements by traders, contributing to the settlements' decline at the dawn of the Bronze Age.