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”.

In a bid to find out how best to avoid getting the plague, Pope Clement VI wrote to the medical facility of the University of Paris, who advised; “No poultry should be eaten, no waterfowl, no pig, no old beef, altogether.  No fat meat…. It is injurious to sleep during the daytime…. Fish should not be eaten, too much exercise may be injurious…. And nothing should be cooked in rainwater….Olive oil with food is deadly….Bathing is dangerous….”

However, the best way to stay healthy was to avoid the infected altogether. John of Forlan, who wrote one of the few surviving accounts from Scotland, said;

“Men shrank from it so much that, through fear of contagion, sons, fleeing as from the face of leprosy or from an adder, durst not go and see their parents in the throws of death”.

This didn’t only apply to laymen; priests also avoided plague victims, denying many people about to die their last rights.  In 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote to his clergy stating;

“Priests cannot be found for love or money…. to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments of the church – perhaps because the fear they will catch the disease”. 

He went on to say that sins should be confessed to a layperson if no clergy can be found and even, “to a woman if no man is available”!

If you were one of the unlucky ones, it was not pretty.  Welsh poet Jeuan Gethin, described the symptoms of the plague in April 1349, he stated;

“We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, and a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance.  Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit; it is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, and a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden

carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, and a white lump.  It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no one.  Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour.  It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste.  They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broke in fragments of brittle sea-coal and crowds precede the end.  It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash.  They are like a shower of peas, the early ornaments of Black Death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries.  It is a grievous thing that they should be on a fair skin”.

Perhaps mercifully, for the many people struck by the plague, one thing they could almost certainly be sure of was that their pain would not last long.  John of Forlan wrote;

“for, to such a pitch did that plague wreak its cruel spite, that nearly a third of mankind were thereby made to pay the debt of nature.  Moreover, by Gods will, this evil lead to a strange and unwanted kind of death, insomuch that the flesh of the sick was somehow puffed out and swollen, and they dragged out their earthly life for barley two days”.

Franciscan monk John Clynn of Kilkenny in Ireland had seen so much death he became convinced he was next;

“Seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead or death to come, I have committed to writing what I have truly heard…. And so that the writing does not perish with the writer or the work fail with the workman I leave parchment for continuing it in case anyone should be alive in the future”.  Following this in different handwriting is written; “Here, it seems, the author died”!

One problem faced by officials everywhere was burying the dead.  Mass graves were dug and filled with corpses without the usual formalities.  Chronicler Agnolo di Tura Del Grasso wrote of the horrors that the plague brought to Siena.  He stated that families were abandoning each other for fear of catching the disease and the dead were being buried in huge pits, “without priest or holy office or ringing of bells”.  He goes on to say that, “nobody wept for the dead, since each was awaiting death; and so many died that everyone thought that the end of the world had come”.

Mongol leader Kipchak Khan Janibeg found one novel way of getting rid of the plague victims from his army.  When laying siege to Caffa and its Genoese inhabitants, Gabriele de Mussis, a fourteenth century lawyer, who like many in the medieval period believed that disease was spread through smell, reported that Janibeg;

“ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside…. Soon rotting corpses tainted the air…. poisoning the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one man in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army”.

De Mussis believed, as do many scholars today, that this directly led to the disease being introduced to Europe.

When the number of victims started to subside, people appear to have felt great relief and started living life to the full.  As a result of low food prices and high wages, the living standard for the surviving members of the lower classes dramatically rose, prompting Florentine chronicler and moralist Matteo Villani to complain;

“The common people, by reason of the abundance and superfluity that they found, would no longer work at their accustomed trades; they wanted the dearest and most delicate foods ….while children and common women clad themselves in all the fair and costly garments of the illustrious who had died”.

Villani also criticized survivors for their lack of gratitude to God for ending the terrible punishment he had inflicted on man.  Rather than becoming more humble, virtuous and pious;

“the opposite happened.  Men ….gave themselves over to the most disordered and sordid behaviour …. As they wallowed in idleness, their dissolution led them into the sin of gluttony, into banquets, taverns, delicate foods and gambling.  They rushed headlong into lust”.

And as ever, many from within the church were by no means different from the rest of society.  Leading bishops and priests came under attack for their sinful ways in the post-plague years, when Pope Clement VI asked them;  

 “about what can you preach to the people?  If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world,  arrogant and given to pomp.  If on poverty, you are the most grasping and most covetous ….If on chastity – but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts”.

Without first hand experience we can never truly understand what it would be like to live through a natural disaster of the magnitude of the Black Death.  However through the study of contemporary testimonies like these we can get an idea of the level of fear felt by people from all walks of life, and the relief felt when it was finally over.