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The Black Death (History)
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TelMiles


In: London
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The Black Death interests me greatly, and I've been reading a book lately that basically concluded that in Europe, some 75 million people died, but that they didn't know how many more "unrecorded" deaths could be added to that total. So conceivably, it could be another 75 million. (By unrecorded he meant the poor deaths).

This led me onto historians making assumptions about any particular area's population size at any point in history. "There were 4 million Celts in Britain in 410AD" - really? and how do you know that? Did you conduct a census? So can someone enlighten me, how do they "know"?

Also, this same logic of theirs is applied to armies and death tolls. Repeatedly in books it says an army of such-and-such a size couldn't really have been as big as is recorded. Why not? Ditto with death tolls. In the Black Death book he constantly rubbished death toll reports of eye witnesses and substituted his own, much lower number. How does he know?

How do they do it?
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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You've raised some truly interesting points, Tel. There seems to be more detail in local than nationwide areas. Estimates for the number of deaths from the Black Death are extraordinarily high, as much as two thirds of the population (whatever that was - 5 to 7 million?), not just in the cramped conditions of cities and not just the poor though cityfolk were doubtless more at risk; it seems to be endemic and the fear of plague was ever-present, no cure or antidote having been found. Also why it disappeared is uncertain.

As for population figures that too is unsatisfactory I agree, which 'authority' do you go with on any given figure? I suppose the scepticism over the size of a reported army is due to the writer's 'slant', unless there are, say, lists of army supplies or tax records to go on.

Is the author of the book you're reading trying to downplay the impact of the Black Death?
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TelMiles


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To be honest Hatty, I don't know what he is trying to do! He plays up the devastating effects of the Black Death but then plays down the amount of people killed. He doesn't accept one single figure given at the time, dismissing them everytime as "an obvious exaggeration", and I just thought, "well, how do you know?"

The whole idea that modern historians know population sizes of the past sits uneasy with me. I just don't see how they would know.
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Hatty
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Tel wrote:
I've been reading a book lately that basically concluded that in Europe, some 75 million people died, but that they didn't know how many more "unrecorded" deaths could be added to that total. So conceivably, it could be another 75 million

Just to illustrate how vague the figures are, Tel, I looked up an admittedly "speculative, but not insane" estimate which puts the TOTAL population for Europe in 1340 at 73.5 million, 5 million in England (the figures include Russia + Slav countries!). The information here is taken from Josiah C. Russell, "Population in Europe:, in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. I: The Middle Ages. The general consensus is that Europe was overpopulated before the Black Death (1348) and that the population went into a sharp decline till about 1420 so the figures quoted must be a serious under-estimate.
[Not only the numbers of deaths attributed to the plague are uncertain but also the effects, almost as if the Black Death were the sole but convenient explanation for far-reaching changes, e.g. Social mobility as result of the Black Death has been postulated as most likely cause of the Great Vowel Shift, which is the principal reason why the spelling system in English today no longer reflects its pronunciation (wikipedia)]
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TelMiles


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I have heard that the Black Death was also the cause of the end of feudalism. A disaster of that magnitude would have many far-reaching implications, hadn't heard of the link to the great vowel-shift before. (nearly wrote bowel then).

It just goes to show Hatty that historians give the air of all knowing authority when they are closer to headless chickens.
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Hatty
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Yes, and re feudalism another conclusion reached is that Russia, unlike the rest of Europe, retained serfdom because it got off relatively lightly - although there are no records for Russia, Poland and Hungary in this respect.

There's a 700 page book on the history of an English village (Crawley, Hampshire) from 909-1928 but apparently no records for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could be found which wouldn't be surprising in a time of great upheaval and movement.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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hadn't heard of the link to the great vowel-shift before.

Me neither.

(nearly wrote bowel then).

And so you should. "Great Vowel Movement", I call it.

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I've heard the bit about the scarcity of labourers enabling them to command high wages and go where they like (dunno what I think about that)... but why is the Hundred Years War never implicated in this social upheaval?

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Is there any connection between the war and the plague à la World War One and flu epidemic?
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Hatty
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Dan wrote:
why is the Hundred Years War never implicated in this social upheaval?


If the countryside was ravaged by plague, what were the implications from the military point of view? [At this stage there were paid conscripts rather than vassals obliged to fight]. Numbers of men drafted should have been affected yet if you read about the Hundred Years War the effects of the plague don't loom large. France at this stage was the most densely populated part of Europe, if you trust the statistics, and was similarly devastated by the Black Death.

Is there any connection between the war and the plague à la World War One and flu epidemic?


Disease kills more people than warfare, doesn't it? I remember being informed about the 1919 'flu epidemic that the population was already weakened by malnutrition as an explanation for why so many people were affected by the outbreak. With the Black Death it seems the other way round though, that c.1340 Europe's population peaked; after 1348 of course numbers declined, dramatically, but it took about 120 years for another population rise, by which time it's agreed that everyone was generally better off and living conditions had improved (despite the Hundred Years War being waged throughout this period).
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TelMiles


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DPCrisp wrote:


but why is the Hundred Years War never implicated in this social upheaval?


Depends what social unpheaval you mean I suppose. The Hundred Years War didn't have that much of an impact on England, save a rise of nationalism and the professionalisation of the army. In France however, where the war was waged it was very different. The English armies (and the English allies) caused destruction in France that wouldn't be seen again until World War 2. And then, even once English armies had gone home, huge companies of mercenaries roamed around robbing whole cities and destroying anything they could.
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DPCrisp


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I don't know anything about the Hundred Years War, but it sounds about as chaotic, in France at least, as the "age of barbarians" is supposed to have been. Is there any sense in which France appears to have reverted to a Dark Age?

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I dunno anything about the Black Death either. Is all this stuff about the reasons for social reform explicitly on record?

Labourers were supposed to become mobile, all of a sudden, to go where the work was. ("2 groats? Gimme 3 or I'm off to Blahblahborough.") And I suppose I can imagine it spreading by word of mouth that such-n-such estates are desperate for workers and will pay anything... but "going to where the work and pay are" usually applies to booming economies, not struggling ones.

Are different areas of the country supposed to have been affected worse by the plague? Shouldn't their economies have collapsed? Did they? Or is the whole thing rather overplayed? If landowners could afford to pay everyone more and business carried on as usual, it must have been a relatively insignificant pay rise, innit?

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I don't know what the long term effects of this mobility were supposed to be: did they go off to make some money and come home again to raise their families, did families relocate, did young men take up with the local lasses?

And what is supposed to have happened to the women while the men were adopting these new freedoms?
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TelMiles


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DPCrisp wrote:
I don't know anything about the Hundred Years War, but it sounds about as chaotic, in France at least, as the "age of barbarians" is supposed to have been. Is there any sense in which France appears to have reverted to a Dark Age?


The hundred years war was indeed devastating to France, which at the time was in reality a patchwork of kingdoms (dukedoms). It is also worth knowing that it wasn't really a case of England vs France (it ended up that way, due to the rise in nationalism) but was in effect a dynastic dispute as King Edward III of England claimed the French crown as he was the closest living relative to the French King (who had just died). When the French refused to recognise him, he invaded and employed a scorched earth policy.
This all stems from King Henry II (Plantaganet) who had a substantial part of France under his control when he became the King Of England in 1154.

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As for the Black Death, its main effect is said to have been the sudden bargaining power of manual workers as there simply wasn't enough of them left to do the work. This led to fundamental changes in the way that England (which, admitedly is the only country I have real knowledge of) as a society was run.
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Mick Harper
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There's no connection between the First World War and the Influenze pandemic. It affected places not in the war just the same as those that were. This is a typical example of lazy historians putting A causes B when A and B just happened at the same time.
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Hatty
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The effect of the plague seems indiscriminate, even the fringes were affected (I once stayed in a "quarantine" village in N. Wales), in some areas whole villages were abandoned.

The economy certainly suffered. If you look at the architecture of the period, there was a hiatus in building projects such as the great Gothic cathedrals between the end of the fourteenth century and the start of the sixteenth. Rising food prices and a shortage of agricultural labour affected the wealthy landowners who took measures to prevent labourers hiring themselves out and led to the Peasants Revolt of 1381, not an obvious 'success story' but another sign that the poorest paid felt strong enough to try to improve their lot, another nail in feudalism's coffin.

Historians take the view that medieval chroniclers exaggerated the death rates, a reflection of the overall sense of doom rather than reality; apparently young children and young men were the worst affected, an explanation for the drastic and long-lasting population reduction, but women don't get mentioned at all. If there was a dearth of young men, presumably there'd be an increase in unmarried women who'd be a drain on a family's resources (if a wife survived while her menfolk succombed to plague, would she have been labelled a witch?).
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TelMiles


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Hatty wrote:

(if a wife survived while her menfolk succombed to plague, would she have been labelled a witch?).


Only if she got on someone's wrong side!

The book I'm reading, "The Black Death" by Phillip Ziegler has quite a bit to say about women and how they were affected just as much as men.

To further muddy the waters, my researches suggest that children had a pretty high chance of surviving the black death, but everyone else didn't. I suppose this would suggest that the lack of workers was immediate. Plus, also don't forget that plague attacks in waves. It has one big attack, ie The Black Death, but then breaks out again periodically, ie the Great Plague of London was a further attack of the Black Death, as was the last outbreak in Britain in c.1905.

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Don't know if anyone is familiar with the Black Death, but it was actually three strands of "plague" at the same time. It started out as Bubonic, but then mutated into Pneumonic and Septasaemic. (or however that's spelt.)
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Mick Harper
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Don't know if anyone is familiar with the Black Death, but it was actually three strands of "plague" at the same time. It started out as Bubonic, but then mutated into Pneumonic and Septasaemic. (or however that's spelt.)

That's a clear indication that it wasn't Bubonic or indeed any other type of "plague" that we are familiar with. The human mind is so anxious to "know" -- especially something as frightening as megadeath -- that everyone reaches for something that is known and then makes the facts fit. And because they don't fit, 'nuances' are added as we go along.
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