This article was originally published August 2023.

The coronavirus pandemic inevitably prompts thoughts of previous pandemics that have afflicted this country. In terms of the proportion of the population that died, and its social, economic, and psychological impact, the most devastating of these was undoubtedly the Black Death of 1348–9. Known to contemporaries as the “great pestilence,” this plague pandemic apparently originated in Central or Eastern Asia and then spread westwards into Europe along trade routes during 1347 and 1348. It seems to have reached England in June 1348, probably via the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset, then spread throughout England during the course of 1348–9, and then into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, before subsiding in 1350.

The Black Death comprised three related strains of plague: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic. The most common – bubonic – was carried by fleas on black rats and could therefore easily spread wherever rats and human beings lived near each other. The pneumonic strain was airborne and could be quickly transmitted from human to human that way. The close proximity of human beings and rats in the cities, towns and villages of lowland areas ensured that mortality was highest there, and somewhat lower in upland areas where the population was more scattered. There were further, less severe, and more localised plague epidemics in 1361–2, 1368–9 and 1375, and these outbreaks continued intermittently for several centuries until the London plague of 1665.