We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy or fair countenance.
Jeuan Gethin, Welsh poet, 1349
The Black Death in England
arrived: June 1348, at Melcombe (now part of Weymouth), Dorset
worst period: autumn 1348 to late 1349
cause: the bacterium Yersinia pestis (plague)
deaths in England: an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the population, perhaps 1.5 to 2.5 million people
reigning king: Edward III
later outbreaks: 1361-62, 1369, 1375 and many more until the Great Plague of 1665
People who lived through it did not call it the Black Death. To them it was the great pestilence or the great mortality. The name "Black Death" came into use in English centuries later, probably from a Latin phrase, atra mors, meaning "terrible death" as much as "black death." By any name it was the worst disaster in English history. In about eighteen months it killed a larger share of the population than any war, famine or epidemic before or since.
Where It Came From
The plague began in Central Asia and travelled west along the trade routes of the Mongol empire. In 1346, according to the Italian lawyer Gabriele de' Mussis, it broke out among a Mongol army besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa in the Crimea, and the besiegers catapulted infected corpses over the walls. Whether or not that happened, Genoese galleys carried the disease out of the Black Sea. It reached Messina in Sicily in October 1347, and over the next year it swept through Italy, southern France and Spain, and on up the valleys of France towards the Channel.
For centuries historians argued about what the disease was. In 2011 scientists extracted DNA from the teeth of victims buried in the East Smithfield plague cemetery in London and confirmed it: the Black Death was plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lives in rodents and spreads through the bites of their fleas. It took several forms. Bubonic plague produced the swellings, or buboes, in the groin and armpits that chroniclers described, and killed perhaps half or more of those who caught it, usually within a week. Pneumonic plague, which infected the lungs and spread from person to person by coughing, killed nearly everyone who caught it, often within a day or two. Historians still debate how much the disease spread by rats and fleas and how much by human fleas, lice and breath.
Arrival in England
The plague reached England through the Dorset port of Melcombe in June 1348. A chronicle kept by the Grey Friars of Lynn records that sailors on a ship from Gascony brought it ashore shortly before the feast of St John the Baptist, on 24 June. From Dorset it spread along the roads and rivers. It reached Bristol in the summer, where it killed so many that, according to one chronicler, grass grew several inches high in the streets. It was in London by the autumn, and through the winter and spring of 1349 it moved across the Midlands, East Anglia and the north. The Scots, hearing of England's misfortune, gathered an army in 1349 to take advantage of it; the plague broke out among them in camp, and they carried it home. It reached Wales and Ireland the same year.
Death on a Scale No One Had Seen
No one counted the dead, but the records that do survive show the scale. The registers of bishops, who had to replace parish priests as they died, show that around 40 per cent of the beneficed clergy in the dioceses of York and Lincoln died, and nearly half in the diocese of Bath and Wells. Priests caught the disease easily because they visited the dying to hear their last confessions. Manor court rolls, which record the deaths of tenants because their heirs had to pay a fee to inherit, show death rates between 40 and 70 per cent on some estates. Most historians now estimate that between a third and a half of the population of England died, and some recent studies suggest more.
The plague did not spare the powerful. Edward III's fourteen-year-old daughter Joan died of it near Bordeaux in 1348 on her way to marry the heir to the throne of Castile. Two Archbishops of Canterbury died within a year, John de Ufford before he could be consecrated and Thomas Bradwardine only weeks after his consecration. But it fell hardest on the poor, who lived crowded together in small houses with their animals and the fleas that came with them.
In London the churchyards filled, and the city opened two emergency cemeteries outside the walls: one at East Smithfield, near the Tower, and one at West Smithfield, on land that later became the Charterhouse. Excavations at East Smithfield in the 1980s uncovered hundreds of bodies laid carefully in long trenches, many in coffins, showing that even at the height of the crisis Londoners tried to bury their dead with dignity. In 2013 workers digging the Crossrail tunnel under Charterhouse Square found more of the plague dead.
The Church struggled to cope. In January 1349 the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Ralph of Shrewsbury, wrote to his clergy that so many priests had died, and so few could be found to visit the sick, that anyone dying without a priest should confess to a layman, "or even, if no man is present, to a woman."
What People Believed
Medieval doctors had no idea of germs. The medical faculty of the University of Paris, asked by the King of France to explain the disease, blamed a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in 1345, which had corrupted the air. Most people believed the plague spread through miasma, bad air rising from rotting matter, and they tried to protect themselves with fires, perfumes and sweet-smelling herbs. Above all they saw it as God's punishment for sin. Bishops ordered processions and prayers. In 1349 a band of flagellants from the Low Countries came to London and whipped themselves in public twice a day as penance, though they found few English followers.
On the continent, rumours that Jews had poisoned the wells led to massacres of whole Jewish communities in Germany, France and Switzerland. There was no such violence in England only because Edward I had expelled England's Jews in 1290.
After the Plague
The first wave died down in England by the end of 1350, but the plague had come to stay. It returned in 1361-62 in an outbreak that killed many children born since the first, sometimes called the "pestilence of children," and again in 1369 and 1375. Outbreaks continued for more than three hundred years, until the last great epidemic, the Great Plague of London in 1665. England's population, perhaps 4.5 to 5 million before 1348, did not recover to that level until around 1600 or later.
The sudden shortage of people turned the economy upside down. Land was plentiful and labourers were scarce, so peasants could demand higher wages and better terms, and many simply left their manors for lords who would pay more. Landowners, facing ruin, turned to the government. The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the Statute of Labourers of 1351 ordered everyone to work for the wages paid before the plague and made it an offence to leave a master or demand more. The laws were widely enforced and deeply resented. They, along with the poll taxes of the late 1370s, helped provoke the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 against Edward III's grandson, Richard II.
Over the longer run, the old manorial system broke down. Lords found it harder to force peasants to work their fields as unpaid labour, and many leased their land to tenants or turned it over to sheep, which needed fewer hands. By the fifteenth century serfdom had largely disappeared from England, and ordinary people ate better and earned more than their grandparents had. Some villages emptied and vanished altogether, though most of England's deserted medieval villages were abandoned more slowly, over the following century. You can read more about the lives of ordinary people on our pages on peasants and serfs and medieval famines.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "The Black Death in England" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/black-death/, September 30, 2026