1350 - Father John - Priest of St. Martin's Church, Bremingehame

On one summer day I said the burial service over 5 people and there were 4 more on the following day. They all died from the terrible black sickness which some call the Plague.

The sickness shows itself with swellings in the groin or armpit. Then more tumours appear in other places. At first I used to go and bless the sick and pray for their recovery but none ever did recover. When the tumours turned black death soon followed, and no remedies worked. As they died the body changed to a stinking black mass of flesh which rapidly decayed with dreadful smells.

The children have invented a new song to sing
Ring-a-ring-a-roses
A pocket full of posies
Atishoo, atishoo
We all fall down

It tells of the symptoms of the plague - the ring of bright red swellings like roses, and how people carry posies or nosegays to help prevent catching the disease. A nosegay is a tiny bouquet of sweet smelling flowers and herbs held under the nose by men and women when out in the street. Sneezing is another symptom, and at the end the victim falls down dead.

When Joan Carter became sick her husband John bought expensive medicine from the doctor. It contained gold, horn of unicorn and magic moon rock but it was no good. The day after she died her little son Ricard fell sick, and on the day of her funeral her daughter Mary fell over at the grave and had to be carried home. She died the next day and was buried along with her little brother.

A traveller who passed through the village just before the sickness started told us that several members of the Royal family in London had recently died. People at court had tried all the latest ideas to prevent the sickness. The King was keeping a dried toad under his shirt and the Queen was seen choking while she tried to smoke a pipe which her doctor had advised her to do twice every day - smoking was a funny idea brought back by travellers from the east. Despite all the precautions the Princess Joanna, daughter of King Edward III died of the plague. All men and women carried pomanders when they went outside. These were oranges coated with cloves and spices and worked like nosegays. Most of the boys were pleased with the advice against bathing and washing. When the son of the Earl of Cumberland became infected the doctors advised coating the boy all over with mercury. At first this appeared to help but by the next morning his gums had gone purple and he was gibbering like an idiot with no brain. His legs and arms were waving all over the place and by evening he was dead. His father had the doctors whipped.

Vinegar appeared to do some good for those who could afford to wash in it. No one knows why but after I tried it I found a lot of dead fleas in the bowl and now I don't itch as much as usual.

The first person in our village fell sick on the day after the traveller had left. We have heard of cases of the Black Sickness before but that year (1348) it was more serious than ever before and over winter did not die out as usual but continued to kill.

I have noticed that in the tiny houses of the poorest people the sickness is worse, and most of those people die. In most of the larger and cleaner houses there is sickness but it does not kill everyone - many more survive. Town people don't bother about the rats which live in the gutters and on the rubbish dumps but I think there is a connection between the plague, the rubbish, the cramped housing of the poor and the rats.

A wool merchant crossed the ford today and told of a village he passed where everyone had died and no-one was left alive. The cows were calling to be milked and the dogs had started to kill sheep as there was no food for them. He saw thieves taking goods from the houses but as they also looked sick he moved on very fast to the next village and did not linger.

In Bremingehame almost two thirds of the people have died and we had to open a plague pit because we did not have the time to spend on digging graves for all who died. The pit was well out of the town, near the High Gate Inn, on the way to Small Heath. We dug it so far away to keep the smell and bad vapours from infecting the survivors.

This year it has been difficult to fill all the farm tenancies as so many have died and at harvest the little children to help and even old Peg-leg John hobbled around collecting turnips for the first time for many years. His old wife, Mary looked after the babies even though she is almost blind, so the mothers could help in the fields.

It will be hard for several years more as there are so few people left to do all the work but with Gods Help we can survive.

I heard that in Makinton the Lord of the Manor has turned most of his land over to sheep as there are so few people to farm the land.

We now know that the Black Death was caused by a bacillus (microscopic organism about a 1000th of a mm long) which can live in the blood-stream of fleas, rats and even humans. Fleas feed on blood and when a flea feeds from an infected rat or person the bacillus enters the flea with its food and breeds rapidly in its gut. At its next meal some of the bacillus will enter the blood of the fleas' blood donor - thus spreading the disease to another rat. Fleas jump from rat to rat feeding all the time. When the rat dies of the plague the fleas move onto another warm-blooded host and if there are no rats near they will move onto humans, feeding and infecting them.

Because of the lack of sanitation, rubbish disposal and the crowded conditions under which even the wealthy lived rats were an accepted part of life, just as mice are in farm buildings today. Body lice, nits and fleas were quite common on people who very rarely washed and so when infected rats appeared death for many people was inevitable.

The rats probably brought the plague to Europe on Italian trading ships coming from the east and when they docked the rats went ashore and found ideal living conditions in the crowded and insanitary Italian towns. Traders and pilgrims carried the disease from place to place and within 4 years Europe had been decimated - over one third of the total population was dead and it took another 300 years for the numbers to build up to pre-plague size again.

The spread of the disease can be plotted on a map
December 1347 Marseilles, Constantinople, Messina
June 1348 Avignon, Rome, Milan
December 1348 Bristol, Calais
June 1349 London, Leicester, Vienna
December 1349 Dublin, Durham
June 1350 Hamburg

Medical research was banned by the Christian Church and so this blocked the chance of finding the cause of the disease, plus the fact that no instruments existed which could have shown anything so small as a bacillus, even if they had known where to look. Vinegar was a genuine preventative but few could afford to wash in it regularly. It killed fleas and prevented their rapid return but was not really effective except in the homes of a few wealthy people.