The Black Death

It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash. - Jeuan Gethin

Philip Ziegler penned a spectacular survey of the 14th century disaster which could've flipped the human lights off permanently. Okay, maybe not extinguish, but certainly a long-lasting dimming was a possibility. This is a splendid book, one which steadily recognizes the limitations of history. Ziegler also prodded me again to finally read Bocaccio.

What did happen during that terrible pestilence of 1348 and 1349? Well, likely 40 percent (or more) of Europe died. People blamed Jehova, eathquakes (releasing the miasma) and with lethal certainty, the Jews. Feudalism continued its shuffle off-stage, conditions may have improved for peasants. The church saw its foundations show more wobble. Fanaticism also spiked. Those who concretely link the Plague with Peasants Rebellions and the Reformation are taking shortcuts, which is understandable. Ziegler's work is one of conjecture and doubt. There is simply so little which can be verified. I suppose the wisdom of the Black Death is that Shit Happens. show less

I’m reading these Black Death books in the order I find them at used book stores, which is unfortunately not their order of publication. I should have read Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death first, since it was published before all the others I’ve been reading. Ziegler describes himself in the Introduction as an amateur medievalist, and admits doing no original work but just synthesizing numerous papers and dissertations published since the last major book on the plague in the 1930s. As such, he’s done a good job, but you would be better off reading the more recent book with the same title by Robert Gottfried.


However, there were a few things in Ziegler’s book that struck me. One was that other authors insist that the term show more “Black Death” was not used until the 17th century; however, Ziegler quotes a contemporary Welsh poem using both “Black Death” and “Black Plague”. Perhaps these were added in translation?


The second was a comment about a water mill in England that had become “valueless” in contemporary documents because the miller and all the client peasants had died. Most historians would cite this as evidence for the death rate or the change in country farming practices brought on by the plague; Ziegler does that to, but also adds that this is an example of the unimaginable personal tragedies of the Black Death. It’s hard to relate to people that died 650 years ago; their names are unknown and their very bones are now vanished to dust. But I did get a little kick in the conscience when forced to think of plague victims as actual people rather than statistics.


Last, Ziegler is in agreement with most other authors on the death rate (somewhere between 30-40%). I’d read this in a number of other works (Ole Bendictow has a much higher death rate but most others cluster around a third of the population), but I happened to think of something else I’d read this time: the mortality rate for untreated bubonic plague is around 40-50%. That implies that if the consensus estimate of medieval plague mortality is correct, almost everybody got it. (Not quite, of course, because there were some cases of the more lethal pneumonic and septicemic forms, and because “untreated” for a peasant in medieval England is quite a bit different from “untreated” for a rancher in rural Colorado). I’d like to see how much documentation there is for people who got the plague and recovered.


Again, worthwhile if you happen to find it cheap somewhere but for an introduction you better off with the more recent Gottfried. show less

Wishy-Washy Tales, Lots About England, Overall Readable

"The Black Death" is a very tedious, though well-researched book. It has two faults: 1) a research dependent on England, and 2) very vague conclusions.

The majority of the book focuses on the statistics of the plague in England. Five of the book's fourteen chapters focus on the spread of the plague in England, while Italy and the rest of continental Europe receive only two chapters. All these chapters describe possible population decreases with Ziegler plowing through a tremendous amount of sources in order to come to a happy medium when those sources disagree. Some of the statistics are very minute, including the number of, say, deacons in a particular parish.

Ziegler's theses in the show more final chapters are very wishy-washy. These chapters go over what effect the plague had on society. In a discussion on medieval labor, Ziegler concludes that while some historians believe this plague had a revolutionary impact on working conditions, that wasn't the case in all parts of England, so therefore the plague had an impact somewhere between nothing and revolutionary. This adds little to our understanding of the plague.

Still, this book is intended as a popular history and it filled a void that I appreciated. It gave me a deeper understanding of the plague and served as a good jumping point from which I can branch out. show less

My reaction to reading this book in 1993.

This is generally thought to be one of the best general histories of the 1347 plague epidemic, and I enjoyed it. It didn’t have as much medical and scientific detail as Robert Gottfried’s The Black Death nor did it have as many non-European accounts and histories as the latter, but it did have many commendable features. Ziegler, understandably given that he’s English and writing for an English audience and the much better official documentation that exists for the event in that country, concentrates for most of the book on the plague in England.

Ziegler likes to quote the statistical conclusions of other historians as to mortality rates and population, but he also does a good job show more illustrating that these conclusions are pretensions to exactitude. We simply can’t say precisely how many people there were in a given area or how many died from the plague. The extrapolations of mortality rates drawn from records of clerical vacancies are a case in point. The vacancy may exist from death due to other causes, flight, or promotion as well as a clergyman dying from the plague. And the ratio of people to clergyman is not known anyway.

Ziegler has a nice chapter where he creates two fictional villages (the details from actual history) and shows the horrible economic, social, and religious effects the plague wrought. He does a particularly good job showing how people psychologically reacted. The plague was, most significantly (and strangely given our own perspective in an age of science) death from mysterious causes. No statements of medical science and bacteriology blunted the terror. At first, in the village, it seems a distant horror (in the fourteenth century, most of the world outside the village is distant in the mental map of people) then it slowly creeps from the Continent to England to one’s own home.

Certain historians have made what seems to be a telling comparision between the similarities of Post WWI Europe and Europe after the plague: economic dislocations, a questioning of religious values, excesses of sex, consumption, and drugs. But the horror of WWI was constrained to the front lines, was a knowable, definite enemy, and the chances of even a front-line soldier dying in WWI were less than a peasant dying – wherever he was – in England. Ziegler talks about the post-plague pilgrimages and debaucheries as both being signs of frenzied gratitude, collective sights of gratitude and relief as surviving. He tells of the sudden preoccupation with grisly death in art, the rise of the cult of St. Sebastian (the arrows that pierce him are also linked the arrows symbolizing pestilience in various paintings of the time), the decline in prestige of the village parson (who was often, at best, seen to be only reluctantly and timorously helping the sick) and the increased prestige of the friar – many who wandered about helping the sick.

Ziegler also addresses the contention that the plague accelerated the commutation of feudal labor services. Ziegler’s conclusion is that this is probably generally true – with a lot of exceptions. In some manors, commutation was in full gear already; in others, commutation was a temporary step before re-instituting labor obligations; in still others, there was a conservative, post plague backlash and commutation became less practiced. Ziegler points out the same variety of circumstances in the question as to how manor lords fared economically. Many experienced temporary gains (from death taxes – however much of this was in the form of livestock that had to be fed and whose price dropped in a flooded market) and then loses due to inflation, higher labor costs, and the higher cost of manufactured goods (many artisans being dead). He documents how some villages really did disappear – not necessarily because the plague killed everywhere but because the inhabitants illegally fled to richer places to better their lot in life (manor lords turning a blind eye to such infractions in order to get labor for their estates). Ziegler also talks about how stating the Black Death led to the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 may be a bit much. Ziegler, in short, does a nice job talking about the Plague’s effects in all their variety without making sweeping generalizations. show less

A scholarly volume based on empirical evidence gathered through historical writings. Engaging, and descriptive, it is a compelling read, a litany of the disastrous effects of the black death in 1348-49 in Europe but primarily in England, following upon the heels of a critical mass of devastating famines from 1272 to 1332. It is futile to apply any generalization if it professed to apply to the whole of England however, it is safe to say the towns managed to survive while the countryside was devastated, and at least 33% of the population of England, Ireland, and Scotland died. Only through the innate ability of the English nation to survive any calamity thrown at it was England able to survive these multiple disasters.

I like how Philip Ziegler's classic story of the Black Death chapter by chapter advances towards England (chapters 1-6) and then tell how the plague affected England itself (chapters 7-13) and finally wraps it up in thematic chapters discussing the lives lost, the social and economic consequences as well as its effect on art and religion. A truly medieval event that was crucial in kick-starting the modern world. While Karl Marx and others stated that theft was at the beginning of capital accumulation, the black death allowed redistribution from the dead to the living in a lethal but not violent way. It is rather surprising that it had not caused more violence, chaos and destruction. Ziegler is amazing in highlighting the continuity of show more public record-keeping and city life in a tumultuous time. Highly recommended. show less

Fascinating. The author stresses the unreliability of the numbers of victims alleged at the time and is commendably keen to avoid dogmatism, given the inevitable constraints on what is knowable and what is not knowable at this distance. He is particularly sceptical about claims that the Black Death caused social, economic, and cultural changes, though without discounting it as a contributing factor which accelerated changes which were already underway.

Some sloppy editing has allowed too many misprints to get through.