Reassessing the impact of the Black Death

The current pandemic has focussed the attention of historians and scientists, indeed anyone with an interest in the past experience of mankind, in such circumstances similar to those we have been experiencing. It is in part academic enquiry and the search for practical knowledge, in part simple human curiosity.

The Independent has a very interesting summary of a Europe-wide project which looked at the scientific evidence available from pollen to attempt to establish the effects on cultivation of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. This is an attempt to map changes in agriculture from surviving botanical evidence from the period 1250-1450 and to see how that compares with the available evidence in chronicle and administrative sources.

The results are striking and illuminating. What appears to emerge is a pattern of the plague having the greatest impact from Greece to central Italy, France, south-western Germany and into Scandinavia….. so fans of Bergman’s  The Seventh Seal need not be disappointed. 

Presumably the same factors occurred in  England but the article does not specifically mention it.

However in Central and Eastern Europe there appears to have been less disruption. I wonder if  - indeed would suggest that - the late medieval strengthening of serfdom there reflects this. The population had not fallen and  were not in a position to bargain with landlords for more favourable, individualistic term. This was in opposition to the pattern west of the Elbe and across the western part of the continent. The Atlantic margins of Ireland and Iceland and also Iberia also show a different pattern, a continuing of the established agricultural pattern. In central Spain as well as in Poland and in what we now call the Baltic states the expansion of cultivation on those borderlands continued and there are no indicators of recession or abandonment 

As the article points out written sources for the Black Death tend to be from western Europe and often record catastrophic events. We know from these accounts that some places were less severely affected - Milan is probably the best known example. For other parts of Europe  the literary sources are scant, and that must have influenced interpretations. This new research opens up possibilities to enlarge our vision of the past.

The article can be read at ‘Black Death’ may not have killed half of Europe as previously believed