Living in Fear: The Black Death

As everybody knows, the period of the Black Death, (1346-1350), was a devastating time for the inhabitants of Europe.  Everybody lost people they loved to the disease and lived with the constant fear that they might be next.  But what was it like to actually be there?  These accounts, from people who lived through the epidemic, go some way to show the fear that they lived with and the relief they felt when it was all over.

Many people believed that the onset of the plague was God’s punishment to man for his immoral behaviour and lack of piety.  Some took this fear of God’s wrath to the extreme; from late 1348, the practice of flagellants spread across central Europe.  The flagellants would whip their own naked body until it bled and then they would fall to their knees, praying for forgiveness for their sins.  They would then return to thrashing themselves until they had worked up a frenzy, meanwhile the Master would read from the heavenly letter, a note found on the alter of the Church at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1343 and believed to be written by God;

“O ye children of men, ye of little faith ….Ye have not repented of your sins nor kept My holy Sunday ….Therefore, I send against you the Saracens and heathen people …. earthquake, famine, beasts; serpents, mice and locusts; hail, lightning and thunder …. water and floods … .Thus I had thought to exterminate you and all living things from the earth; but for the sake of my Holy Mother, and for that of the holy cherubim and seraphim [angels] who supplicate for you both day and night, I have granted a delay.  But I swear to you…., if ye keep not My Sunday, I will send upon you wild beasts such as have never been seen before, I will convert the light of the sun into darkness …. and I will smother your souls in smoke”.

The great Benedictine preacher Thomas Brinton also argued that the disease was a result of Gods wrath.  He stated;

“We are not constant in faith; we are not honourable in the eyes of the world, on the contrary of all men we are the falsest and in consequence unloved by God.  It is undoubtedly for that reason that there exists in the kingdom of England so marked a diminution of fruitfulness; so cruel a pestilence so much injustice, so many illegitimate children – for on every side there is so much lechery and adultery that few men are content with their wives but each man lusts after the wife of his neighbour and keeps a stinking concubine”.