Interpreting the Black Death

A couple of months back in Reassessing the impact of the Black Death and in More about the impact of the Black Death I wrote about  recent research into the evidence for the relative impact of the Black Death across Europe. The study I referred to suggested significantly different degrees of decline in the population in various regions of the continent.  The study is summarised in an article from the Mail Online at Black Death did not impact all regions equally, study claims

In my own note I suggested that such local studies are very important in themselves but tried to suggest that the overall picture was likely to have been variable - indeed that was already known for some. but not all, parts of Europe - and that accurate generalisations across the continent are difficult to make. This point is also made in a good piece about this and related studies on Medievalists.net which can be seen at How devastating was the Black Death?

It suggests that other factors such as warfare in France in western Normandy and on what were once the borderlands of Denmark and Sweden could account for changing patterns of cultivation as much as disease. That said it is worth adding that the apparently more affluent situation in Brittany would co-exist with the civil war there over the succession to the Ducal title. 

This is not to reject the evidence presented and the argument about the significance of pollen deposits but it does both qualify and enhance it. Trying to see the whole picture in a locality or region is the aim, however difficult that may be to achieve.

The article also refers to s study of pottery fragments from East Anglia, which suggest a considerable contraction in economic and social life around the time of the Black 

Death. This study is reported on in a 2016 article, again from the Mail Online, which can be seen at Pottery used to estimate the Black Death's effect on rural populations

Research into the deadly pathogen which caused the pandemic, from the same year and same newspaper, can be seen at One strain of bacterium was behind the Black Death and Great Plague

I have posted about the survival of the disease in Asia in The origins of the Black Death

Returning to more localised studies I also posted in 2020 a note about recent research into the variable spread of infection in fourteenth century Ireland and its differing impact on the Celtic Irish and the Anglo Irish communities. This can be read in The Black Death in Ireland

Contemporary reactions to the Black Desth from writers and administrators are introduced in an article in The Conversation which can be seen at How medieval writers struggled to make sense of the Black Death