← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
Ryan Reynolds
They say opposites attract. That's why the Sleep Number Smart Bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm but they want soft. Sleep Number does that you want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm. Sleep Number does that too. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed so you can choose your ideal comfort on either side and now save 40% on the new SleepNumber Special Edition Smart Bed limited time exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [00:59]
Unknown
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone Paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [01:21]
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com worried about what ingredients.
- [01:31]
Are hiding in your groceries? Let us take the guesswork out. We're Thrive Market the online grocery store with the highest quality standards in the industry. We restrict 1000 plus ingredients so you can trust that you'll only find the best high quality organic and sustainable brands, all free of the junk, with savings up to 30% off and fast carbon neutral shipping. You get top trusted groceries at your door and you can stop worrying about what your kids get their hands on. Start shopping@thrivemarket.com podcast for 30% off your first order and a free gift.
- [02:10]
Anthony Delaney
1348 Florence. Your footsteps echo down paved streets, across broad squares. Tall buildings tower over you, grand columns and vaulted arches, turrets and coats of arms. This is one of the largest and most powerful cities in Europe, a place usually buzzing with endless commerce. But this is 1348, the year of the Black Death in Florence, and the air is filled with the stench of death. Ahead of you. You see two men dragging a corpse behind them trying to keep up with a priest. A dead body is given the Same respect given to an animal carcass. These days, you catch the eyes of people as they pass. Some are full of fear, but most are like yours, exhausted beyond belief, almost beyond caring. Hollow laughter rings out from one house, music from another window, moans from another. A worker slouches past wearing finely embroidered clothes that fit poorly, doubtless stolen from a house emptied by disease. But who can blame them? Everyone is surviving this as best they can. A group who have thrown care to the wind go roaring past you now, drunk on wine and cheering each other forward to the next inn or to oblivion, whichever comes first. The sun is shining and not far off. Sitting on a front step as if to enjoy the warmth of a pleasant day, is the body of one of the dead dragged there by its neighbors when they notice the smell, buboes bulging under its neck. It's not alone. Corpses are here, there and everywhere. Now it is as if the end of the world has come. How are we to behave? How should we feel? What was it to live through the Black Death?
- [04:27]
Maddy Pelling
Hello, and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.
- [04:29]
Anthony Delaney
And I'm Anthony.
- [04:31]
Maddy Pelling
Now, last week we looked at an origin story, not the origin story, but just one of many of how the Black Death entered Europe. And our guest for that episode was Dr. Hannah Barker. So if you haven't listened to the episode, go back, check it out, arm yourself for what's coming next. Now, there's a statistic that you hear bandied around rather a lot when it comes to the Black Death, and that is that somewhere around half of the European population died of this disease. Now, it's really, really, really hard to get your head around that statistic, to get to the human experience at the heart of it. And today we're going to try and answer that question. We're going to see what it was like to live through the Black Death and hopefully to survive it. We are going to be heading to 14th century Italy, one of the first and worst hit countries in Europe. And here to help us tell that story today is the one, the only Helen Carr, medieval historian extraordinaire, whose new book, Sceptered A history of the 14th century, is out in May. When I tell you I'm excited for this book, you cannot imagine. We are recording remotely today. And Helen is in the History Here offices and she's brought a copy of the book for me and Anthony. And I have never wished. She's waving at it on the screen. I literally have never wished so much to be able to reach through the computer screen and grab it. Helen oh, I'm gushing. Welcome to After Dark.
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Helen Carr
Thank you for having me. That's a very nice precis, isn't it?
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Anthony Delaney
I like that history here let you in the building, but not us today.
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Maddy Pelling
Yeah, we're not allowed in.
- [06:02]
Anthony Delaney
Banished. You two go to your little offices, wherever you are. We'll bring Helen into the office. Listen, I want to ask you a question before we get started. You have just written a new history of the 14th century. This is a complete history. You have covered in that. I know parts of the Black Death. Why do you think it's important in the context of this century that we have a pretty good understanding of the Black Death and its consequences and its impacts?
- [06:27]
Helen Carr
That's a really good question. And the Black Death, for me, was one of the leading points as to wanting to write about this whole century, because it really presents a sort of nadir in the book. And it is the. Literally the middle of the century, it's 1348, that it arrives, starts to arrive in England, 1349, and it is the sort of pinnacle of the century. And then everything changes afterwards. The demographic changes, society changes. There are shifts in social hierarchy. There are shifts going forward in how people consider death. There are shifts also in how people consider what it is to be English. It's a huge, huge part of people's existence and it shaped the rest of history into the early modern period.
- [07:14]
Maddy Pelling
This was meant to be an episode just with me and Anthony, but we realised we needed some hand holding through this particular history, a little bit of supervision, if you will. That said, I'm now going to force Anthony to give me the context of the Black Death and give us a little bit of an overview of the period. And then we're going to ask Helen how he's done. Sorry in advance, Anthony.
- [07:31]
Anthony Delaney
Look, we have, as Helen was saying there, we're situating ourselves more or less in the centre of the 14th century, and we see that in the case of the Black Death, it's arriving in European ports. Specifically. Bear that in mind. European ports. Venice, Genoa, Marseille. In around 1347, as we've heard from Dr. Hannah Barker in a previous episode, then we are seeing that by 1351, it's reached almost every corner of Europe. So this is a pretty rapid and devastating spread. Because if you think about it, Europe's population at the outbreak of the plague was about 75 to 80 million, it's been estimated. But by the time it's run its course in this particular outbreak in 51, we're looking at it having reduced by 30 to 60% within a few years. Most likely closer to the 60%. As far as we. Now, we're going to be talking a lot about the Italian context today. Just to give you a little bit of an insight. Italy is not a unified country at this time. It's a collection of territories and city states. So when we're talking about these individual places, such as Florence, just keep that in mind as we go through. Back in England, as Helen can tell much better than I can, Edward III is on the throne and the Hundred Years War is in progress. Actually, Helen, just as a backdrop to this plague in terms of the English backdrop, and I know we're going to be concentrating mostly on Italy or the Italian. How important do you think that the Hundred Years War is in terms of the backdrop to this as well? Just to put the. Like, we're talking about a huge plague and a huge war coming together. It doesn't sound like a great melting pot.
- [09:01]
Helen Carr
Well, it's a giant pain in the ass for Edward iii because he's just won the Battle of Crecy and he's doing really well, and he's on his ascendant. And then, guess what? The Black Death comes, and one minute he's celebrating his establishment of the Order of the Garter and dressing as a pheasant, and then the next minute he's having to deal with a country that 50% of his population are d. So it becomes this huge administrative error. It puts a complete pause on the war entirely. He has to shut down all of the ports. There's no pilgrimage. Nobody is allowed to leave or come in. It's a real problem. He's got to think about hygiene. He's got to think about actually how to look after people in the cities and try and keep people alive. And on a personal level, he just does what every wealthy nobleman does and goes to his house in the country.
- [09:45]
Maddy Pelling
Naturally. Now, Helen, you set out so much there, how. How the Black Death interacts with all these other events in history and indeed how it changes the course of history in the 14th century and in the centuries to follow. But let's go down to that human personal level that you're talking about there with Edward. And aside from the experience of any rich nobleman with a country estate to escape to, what was the experience of the ordinary, say, medieval peasant going through the Black Death? What symptoms would they be looking out for? What was life and death like in this moment?
- [10:18]
Helen Carr
Well, the Black Death spared nobody, but I think it's unfair to say that the peasants got off, just as everyone else did, because they didn't. They were certainly the worst hit because they were living in more cramped conditions. They were living in closer quarters. They were often living in sort of small villages, hamlets, but also within the city. They were sort of squashed together. And you can still see remnants of sort of how medieval houses used to look. And they sort of, kind of coming in at the top of each other. There's filth running down the streets, there's fleas in your houses, you're sharing beds with multiple, multiple people in your household. Disease is going to spread faster in those sorts of environments. So of the social classes in England and across Europe, it was the peasant class that suffered the worst. And that's why after the first wave, one of the major social changes is the serf class, the serfdom class, which were effectively a slave class in England particularly, it ceased to exist because people no longer were bound by this sort of fatalistic sense of their existence. You know, they weren't born as a serf and therefore they had to live as a serf. If they survived the Black Death, they suddenly were worth something. They could work land, they knew how to plow, they were valuable people and they started to demand a wage and therefore escaped that sort of pre constructed social sphere.
- [11:38]
Anthony Delaney
Well, let's abandon England for a minute and talk about sunnier climes. Mind you, today is a lovely sunny day in London, so who knows? But I want to take us to Florence for a moment because one of the most famous accounts of the Black Death comes to us from Florence and is written by Giovanni Boccaccio, and he is a major figure in European literature. He was kind of an Italian Chaucer, I suppose, and he writes about the Black Death in the Decameron, which is a collection of 100 short stories. And I just want to share an extract with you both about a description of a Florentine plague. Basically, I think it'd be interesting then, Helen, to talk to you about how this matches up with English experience. And if you see anything that's particularly unique to the Florentine experience. But I'll read the extract first. It says this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles, their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children as though they did not belong to them. I mean, it's almost impossible for us to understand this even having been through a pandemic ourselves. Does this match up to the English archive as well, Helen, or do you see this as being a very unique situation?
- [13:04]
Helen Carr
No, it doesn't. To put it bluntly, I think it is a very exaggerated literary account of the plague. And, of course, Boccaccio delivers this incredibly powerful opening to Decameron and talks about how the plague enters Florence and the panic and the fear. And I think you do get a very strong sense of the panic and the fear. And of course, he talks about the physical symptoms of the plague. So with the bubonic plague, as he describes these lumps under the armpits and the neck, that was universal. That was something that anybody who is infected with plague did experience, particularly the bubonic plague. But one of the things that I will say is, from the work that I have done, and I would say that this certainly applied to Italy and the rest of Europe and Northern Europe as well, in fact, the world. I don't think people were abandoning their loved ones. I think they cared very deeply for their loved ones. I don't think this was a case of people just throwing bodies into pits, as what has been assumed. And that has been a very popular cultural conception, that the plague people were just. It was chaos. Bodies were being flung into pits, they were being burned on the street and dragged. Right. But actually, evidence shows it wasn't like that at all. So I think the catch is, I think his analysis here is quite rightly, and I think that you see that with a lot of medieval literary figures, you see a lot of exaggeration, there's a certain sense of mimesis and the idea that they're trying to create this sense of absolute catastrophe. So what is the worst thing that we could possibly say? And let's make that happen. So it's not that people weren't abandoning each other, that possibly did happen. But I think from what I've seen, as in the record, it would show the opposite, that people were actually very caring for the dead and they were also very considerate for the people who lived around them within their communities. Because even in Florence, as it was anywhere else, community in your parish was everything.
- [15:02]
Anthony Delaney
So what you're saying is Helen Carr says Boccaccio can get in the bin.
- [15:08]
Maddy Pelling
Her official stance.
- [15:09]
Anthony Delaney
We're going to use that as your statement. Okay, yeah.
- [15:12]
Helen Carr
Quote me on that.
- [15:13]
Maddy Pelling
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, Helen, tell me what it would have been like to actually catch plague. What are the symptoms to look out for? At what point would you start to panic?
- [15:22]
Helen Carr
Good question. So it took a while. So the plague virus lived within the body for about a week and then it was the actual symptoms started to appear and then you'd really have a few days. So some of the faster moving plagues, there were different types of plague, but the most virulent to the most infections were the pneumonic plague and the bubonic plague. And so the mnemonic plague would be sort of a pneumonia of sorts. But the bubonic plague was the most famous and the most virulent. And that happened over a case of three days. You start to become really unwell. You'd start to develop these sort of flu, like, symptoms. That's always what the NHS says. Do you look out for flu, like, symptoms for, like, everything? Right.
- [15:58]
Maddy Pelling
There was no 111 to ring.
- [16:01]
Helen Carr
Yeah. There was no, like, what version of the plague is this?
- [16:03]
Maddy Pelling
One couldn't Google. Yeah.
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Helen Carr
No, it was a case of you'd be very, very unwell, you'd need to rest, you'd need to lie down, you'd stop wanting to drink water and then you'd start to sweat profusely. And that's when you' start to see these sorts of blackenings around the body and they've become these play buboes. Some of them are huge. They were usually in your lymph nodes, so under your armpits, around your neck, around the groin. And they were hard. They were like boiled eggs under the skin. And because of the infected blood, they would. Anthony's face right now is quite funny. Because of the infected blood, they would start to go black and they. That's where this idea of black plague black spot started to.
- [16:43]
Maddy Pelling
I have to say, I've always imagined the buboes being soft and sort of poppable, and now you're saying they're hard. That's so much work.
- [16:50]
Helen Carr
Yeah. Generally, if people did survive the buboes burst, if you did survive it, my goodness, you were like walking around with the sort of swagger as the first group of people who had their Covid jabs. You know, it was like, you were.
- [17:04]
Maddy Pelling
Good, you were good.
- [17:08]
Helen Carr
Foreign from the Tony and Ryan podcast from Down Under. This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the country. These guys are no longer the prepaid wireless company you might remember. They've invested billions into building their own 5G towers across America, transforming the carrier into America's fourth major network alongside the other big dogs. Yep. They're challenging the competitors by working harder and smarter, like this amazing new network they've literally built. They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or find them online@boostmobile.com they say opposites attract.
- [18:01]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [18:31]
Unknown
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone Paying Big Wireless Way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, with Mint you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [18:53]
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com worried about what ingredients.
- [19:02]
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- [19:40]
Maddy Pelling
I mean, it says so much, doesn't it, about especially with this period of history, with the Black Death in particular. We have all these preconceptions and we have the image of the plague doctor which we are going to myth bust in another episode. And spoiler alert, it comes to a later century. It's not from the 14th century, but we come with all these ideas of what the plague was like, what the experience was like. And a lot of that, I suppose, is down to the sources that are left to us, like Boccaccio. And what is it like as a historian of this period, Helen, having to dig down beneath that and find other ways of telling the history and other pieces of evidence. How do you piece together the experience and also the emotions of ordinary people in this moment, when the only written records that we seem to have are from people who, for various different motivations, want to paint a slightly different picture from what the reality is.
- [20:33]
Helen Carr
So I think being a medieval historian, which might differ from being a historian of other periods, is that you have to sort of cast your net slightly wider and you have to think about things on multiple different terms. So you might have to read papers on archaeology, bioarchaeology, if I'm getting that right, obviously did that reading clearly and literally. You know, you have to look at sort of literary historians work and you have to look at art historians work. You have to really concentrate. You have to think of a really macro, broad picture of what this century looked like, felt like, smelt like, how people were preserved, how they died, all of these things, because the information doesn't exist. And one thing that we do have as historians of the Black Death, is that there is a distinct lacuna in the record as to what we know happens. There's very little to say, well, this happened and this individual person here felt like this about it. They were very scared, they were very upset. So we have to think more broadly. And you have to also expand outside of your. So, for example, I work on medieval England. I was looking at records from Syria. I was also looking at records from Florence, looking at Boccaccius de Cameron. And what you do get a sense of is this huge, huge sense of fear and panic from those written records. But then closer to home, you look at things that emerged later. So this is when people were living with the sort of PTSD of the Black Death. You know, they weren't painting. Well, they might have been painting on church walls as to what was going on, but that doesn't survive. But what does survive is later representations of a very distinct. There's almost like the space between life and death has become thinner for people. People, and they live with death in a way that people didn't necessarily live with death to quite the same extent as before. And certainly the way they lived with death is incomparable to how we feel about it today. It's something that was an accepted norm. And around through this, and this is throughout Europe, the cult of memento mori became huge. So this is into the later 14th century, particularly into the 15th century. And in Italy, with the development of the Renaissance, you see a lot of this. So examples would be the dance macabre. So there's the skeletons dancing around with the living In a circle, singing, ring, a ring of roses, et cetera. It's that kind of visual representation of death and life being very close together and being inevitable. And so you do get more of these visual representations of doom paintings, the apocalypse happening, because people did think that the Black Death in that moment was an apocalypse. They thought it was God's wrath. Is this the end of the world? And then when you're thinking about archaeology, the really interesting things that has been discovered is that people weren't buried sort of flung into plague pits or not buried at all. They were actually buried very carefully and they were buried sort of one stacked on top of each other very neatly. And that was only in the rare case that there were large pits. Most of the time. Families were often buried together or you would have couples buried together. There was a lot more humanity shown towards people than I think has been previously assumed. And you see this across Europe. It's not just what I've worked on in England. You definitely see it in Florence as well.
- [23:49]
Maddy Pelling
It's so interesting, isn't it, because Boccaccio's account is so full of this panic that you speak of and this feeling that society is breaking down, that parents are rejecting and abandoning their children, you know, that nature has been turned on its head and. And it's easy to think when you contemplate the scale of this, that potentially up to 60% of the population was lost. It is easy to imagine that dignity and humanity would go out the window. And yet what you're saying is really the opposite and that there was a sensitivity there and a striving for dignity that I think we, in our own moment in the modern world would like to think that we possess. And I think the popular vision, again, kind of trying to mythbust this a little bit, the popular vision of the medieval period is that it is dull. It's the quote, unquote, Dark Ages. And, you know, that's a well rehearsed argument now to kind of reject that hypothesis. But I think when it comes to the Black Death, there's still this feeling that everything was turned on its head, that people abandoned their roles in society, their beliefs, and gave in to fear. And sure, fear was prevalent, but actually there's an effort to resist that and to keep hold of some form of normalcy or goodness, I suppose. Do you think that's fair?
- [25:05]
Helen Carr
I think it's fair. I mean, I think there were practical measures taken, for sure. I mean, people were locking themselves away, people were ingesting anything that they thought they could you know, there was a spiritual remedy that was concocted which talked about having to sort of swallow your sins, swallow all of these horrible things that you've done in your life, and then go and vomit somewhere. So it was a kind of a spiritual purge to try and quell God's wrath. And then there was also examples of the flagellants, which we might come to shortly. But I think that, by and large, people did care about their loved ones. I mean, what do we do? We. We turn inwards, we look at the people we love. We don't think on selfish terms. The fear usually comes from the fear of something happening to somebody that you love dearly. And we know that people experienced love. They experienced love in the Middle Ages. It was an emotion that was conceived and experienced in very, very evocative and. And they demonstrated it in an incredibly powerful ways. And I think that people did care about their loved ones, but they also, crucially, cared about their community. Community was such a huge thing to people living in the 14th century. Your parish was like your family. And of the records that I looked at, there was a man who, in his will, wanted to leave all of his material wealth to his parish, to his community. And he took a chest of his gold and he gave it to his parish church. And he said, keep it there for people to have if they need. And when they have managed to pull themselves out of the hard times, they can refund it and it can be available for somebody else. So it was this sense of community and collective support. And I think that is something you see. And if you look at the establishment of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge that was established by the community to pray for the souls of the dead, because the church, the local parish, was so overwhelmed with the amount of people that were dying. And so the community created a space that the souls of the dead could be prayed for. And this space between. Between. This movement between life into death was taken very seriously. It was a process that felt like it was. It was a human right to have aided by somebody. And you were expected to receive that spiritual support and salvation in the same way as you receive it on a very medical basis now as a basic human right. So I think that people. I think people were far more aware and concerned for each other, even though there was this collective panic and practical measures were put in place. When it came to the emotional side of it, I think it was a collective experience. Everybody was in the same boat.
- [27:46]
Anthony Delaney
You mentioned the flagellants there, Helen. And that's one of the groups of People that might stand out when we're talking about these kind of histories, give us a little bit of an insight as to exactly what a flagellant was.
- [27:59]
Helen Carr
The clue is in the name. They were self flagellators. So what they did is they. They were groups of people mostly over from northern Europe and they traveled into England. So I'll start with England, but there is an interesting case in Italy as well. They moved into England and they would travel through the country. Great, thanks guys. Probably spreading plague as they went. And they were doing this as an act of extreme penitence. It was trying to mimic the pain of Christ as he was, as he was going to his death. And so they were walking along, chanting in tandem. And then they would had their own whip and they would be sort of self flagellating with this whip, but it was a whip with sort of. It was a scour. So it had lots of different threads on it and it had at the end a knot. And on the knot was tied little bits of glass or thorn. And they would walk around, they would keep whipping themselves and then on occasion they would stop and lie down in the shape of the cross. And then they get up and carry on again. So they walked almost naked. They wore just a cloth, not quite a loin cloth. They were slightly more covered than that. It was like a knee length sort of cloth around their bodies, a bit of linen. And then they just walked through the country. Flagellating. And they were, I can imagine, quite an intimidating spectacle. And you saw something similar in Italy, but these people were called the bianchi. And they weren't quite as naked as the flagellants who moved through England. They wore white robes and these sort of canonical headdresses as well sometimes. And it was also men and women and sometimes children. And they had the same act. They would walk from town to town. So it'd be communities of people and they'd be richly self flagellating.
- [29:33]
Maddy Pelling
How were they looked upon by the communities that they moved through? Helen, was this seen as an unusual thing to do or was this. Were people grateful that this small group of people was taking it upon themselves to ask forgiveness for God during this great punishment, as it were?
- [29:48]
Helen Carr
It's really hard to know. And this is where some of the more kind of methodical ways of looking at the history of emotions come in. Because sometimes it's hard to tell how people felt, because do people even identify with the same feelings that we have today? Or they would do, but what sort of. How would they describe those feelings as far as we can tell in regard to what we know about the flagellants was that there wasn't much reaction to them. Maybe it was a sense of fear. People didn't want to disturb their practice. And I think there probably was more of a collective understanding that this was a group of people acting for the sake of humankind, not necessarily as an individual act. I think it wasn't always an individual act. Again, you saw a lot more of community focused means of behavior in this period. And I think think that it would probably have been the case that communities saw this as more of a selfless act in relation to trying to redeem mankind in some way, rather than something that they were angry about or fearful that these people were spreading. I mean, I suppose in their minds it was a very extreme act of religious penance, sort of kind of the level up from what the clerics were enacting in the church.
- [31:04]
Anthony Delaney
Let's talk about some of those practical steps that were put in place. I'm taking us back to Italy, not so much to Florence, just to a city outside, a little outside of Florence. And it's called Pistoia. And I have some ordinances from May 1348 here in front of me. And I'm just going to read, it's quite listy, so if anybody wants to interject at any point, please do. But these are some of the steps that you're talking about, the steps that communities are taking. And these are some of the steps that the community in question here is taking to try and keep that link. You see, Helen, which I really loved, that that kind of closeness to death started to become even closer than it had been before, that people were living with death. And I think these are some of the measures that they took to try and keep death at bay for as long as they could. So in the pistonian ordinances of 1348, no one was to enter the city or leave the city or district without the council's prior written permission. So that's one of the things that they put in place there. No one was to bring anything into the city or the district, including used cloth. If they did, they'd be burned in the main square. I also kind of like this idea that it's very visual that punishment of getting rid of any potentially infected items, such as cloth or clothing, they're just going to burn them in the central square, which is quite interesting. Corpses may be taken out of homes only in caskets, sealed to confine rather foul odor, and must be buried with them. So we're Talking about that contagious and anti miasma thing there. So it's interesting because clearly in Italy they're also believing in this miasmic transfer of the plague that we see in England as well. Graves are to be dug about 1.45 meters deep to confine the corpse's foul stench. Again, miasma, we're talking about the smell that people pretend before germ theory. People are thinking that that's maybe how they're catching this illness.
- [32:54]
Maddy Pelling
This is nothing new. So does that suggest that people in the Black Death in particular are being buried in a different way? Helen, you talked about coffins being stacked, stacked one on top of the other. Are they being buried closer to the surface as a general rule because they're dying so quickly?
- [33:08]
Helen Carr
I think people were stacked in coffins. I think they were buried without any sort of encasement. A lot of the time I don't see. I haven't seen any evidence of people being buried. I mean, if you were a wealthy person and you had something kind of preconceived pre put in place, then maybe some people were buried in those terms. I mean, certainly we know that there were people like royalty, nobility, who were buried in coffins and they had a proper burial. But if for the layman it was these plague pits.
- [33:34]
Anthony Delaney
It's funny because we talk about some of these measures being pre germ theory, but there was an idea, they weren't quite sure of the spread, but there was an idea that something is moving from one set of people to another set of people, and they didn't quite know what was even causing the problem. Like we see in these ordinances as well, that butchers came in for a lot of scrutiny. So they were asked not to put any filthy matter or any carcasses hanging out. You know, often we see that in a period drama or something where there's a carcass hanging to advertise the wares. There is an understanding that something is carrying this, but they're just not entirely sure. Helen, do we have a similar set of ordinances for England at all? Are there being so prescriptive in England, or is it something that's far more organic?
- [34:18]
Helen Carr
No, it's equally very prescriptive. And so this is a case that I think across Europe, across any of the countries that were affected by plague, very practical measures were put in place. And it's interesting what you were saying earlier, Maddy, about this idea that the Middle Ages are still a dark. That sort of people wouldn't have any sort of sense of like Science or bacteria, but actually they really did. I mean, yes, they were God fearing communities and they were God fearing people. And then when they say the wrath of God, I don't think they thought that God was selecting them as individuals and going, you next. I think that they thought that it was a collective effort against God as to why he thought, well, now we have to. I mean, everything's biblical, there's obviously the biblical plagues, so people probably linked it back to that. But that doesn't mean that their knowledge of how to keep themselves clean and healthy was absent. People were clean, people use soap, people washed, people did take care of their bodies and themselves. So some of the practical measures that were put in place in England were they had all of the drains moved. They weren't allowed to have any sort of filth or waste coming through drainage systems. They also made sure that any plague pits were buried away from the city. So Smithfield, there was a plague pit, so that was outside of the city. They didn't want any plague pits near the walls. There were also very practical measures about people having to stay within their homes if they had a member of the family that was infected with plague. Again, very understandable, very practical, very pragmatic. Decisions were made and it's very community.
- [35:50]
Maddy Pelling
Minded in a way that I think we probably don't recognise now. You know, in 2020 and the COVID pandemic, there was a struggle for everyone to sort of accept that we had to take, take communal responsibility and act as a group and not as individuals. And what you're describing in the medieval period here, Helen, is that actually people already lived in these terms in these communities, and that dealing with something like this, whilst traumatic on a mass scale, the way that they met those challenges was very community minded, which is fascinating. The other thing that's really interesting, I'm just looking at this list again and thinking about how you were describing Helen, accessing the emotions of the period and how we can get to the real human experience. And one of the rules for Pistoia here is that to avoid scaring the sick, the cathedral bells must not be rung during funerals. That is so emotive to me. And it takes you straight away into the landscape, the cityscape, the soundscape of this moment.
- [36:52]
Helen Carr
Yeah, the soundscape is wonderful, isn't it? Because these were communities where their day was dictated by the tolling of, of the parish church and the vows, but also with the funerals of the dead, you know, even if these were mass funerals, but it also, this Is the funerals. Does that mean mass funerals? Is that an individual was there a lot more respect that was being paid than Boccaccio is saying in his Decameron. If you look at that, which is evidence in the, in the record of in Florence, it's kind of countering what Boccaccio is saying about people not caring and people abandoning everything and everyone. That seems to me much more a case of people are being incredibly thoughtful and caring and community minded and conscious of the fear of death for those who were suffering. I mean that's not abandonment in my mind.
- [37:55]
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- [39:06]
Maddy Pelling
Let'S talk about the, the authorities in this scenario. Do you see in England the authorities acting in the same way? Helen, we're sort of thinking about this very community based approach and we've talked about the peasant experience. But how effective were authorities in England in dealing with this or putting similar measures in place?
- [39:28]
Helen Carr
Well, one of the major authorities was the church. And the church sort of responded in quite punitive ways, obviously these practical measures that were taking place. But some of the, it was a lot of blame culture, culture within the church and the clerical records. So there's things like people blaming people's items of clothing, people were wearing shoes that were too long or it was, you know, appalling behavior. There was this sort of licentiousness of the court and the over partying, overzealous nature of the king and his government. And then there was also a really interesting one about blaming young children and saying that young children, not listening to their parents and doing as they're told, they invited this wrath of God and they invited this plague. And so therefore they should be punished even so far as death. I was like, my gosh, can you imagine leveling that at my two kids when I need to get their shoes on in the morning to get to school? I mean, that would be quite an impressive feat, wouldn't it? It's like you count yourself lucky in the 21st century because. So the Church was a big authority and they did respond in certain ways that were incredibly punitive like that in the blaming. But they also conducted a significant amount of additional prayers. There were increased services, they increased the amount of services that they were giving. They were, they were preaching more radically. They were, they were more active within the community than I think they ever had been. So at this point, clerics were doctors, they were also medics, but they were also those who were giving the sort of spiritual care at the end of life. They were sort of the effective front line. So there is this faction of the Church that was being angry and quite sort of cruel in their approach to how to people's actions in the development of the Black Death. But then they were also these people who were these. The primary caregivers for people at the end of life. And those who were sick looked at the Church for both physical and spiritual salvation. And then the government was practical. But the more sort of, I would say, rash measures came slightly later when they started to see a shift in the way that people were behaving after the plague. So when you had this initial loss of life, the jurisdiction that had to be put in place, like the Statute of labourers etc in 1352. But again, their measures were more a case of moving everything out of the cities. Government was postponed, there was no parliament, there were no sort of large group meetings. But I think, to be honest, it was all such a disaster and such a mess. It's difficult sometimes to locate exactly what went on because there's not always surviving evidence. But I imagine there was a lot more structure in place and a lot more authority put in place when there needed to be.
- [42:01]
Anthony Delaney
It's funny you should say that actually, Helen, because we do have an example from Milan specifically, where the Visconti family, who are the kind of ruling family there, as soon as they got the slightest whiff of plague heading their way, they shut the city up immediately. And there's even the stories, you know, you're talking about some of those more draconian things that were happening, which, especially to 21st century eyes, look particularly cruel. So, for instance, in Milan, they had examples of forcibly bricking people into their houses so they couldn't get out and they couldn't spread the disease if they thought that they were potentially infected. However, Milan had significantly fewer deaths from plague than most other Italian cities. So there is. It's kind of hinting at this thing you were talking about earlier, Helen, whereas they have knowledge about how this is spreading to a certain extent, and they know certain things that they need to do to stop this. This isn't, you know, a totally naive group of people, even though, you know, as we say, some of the measures seem. I would not have liked to been bricked into my house when I caught Covid for the first time, for instance, you know. But it's interesting that it's happening nonetheless and that it's having an impact. Fewer deaths because of it.
- [43:06]
Helen Carr
Yeah. And I think that it's interesting because some of the earliest examinations that were going on and this sort of panic is to try and understand medically what this was about is happening in Avignon, and that was the seat the papacy at the time. But it was also a place where a lot of this medical work and research was being conducted. They discovered evidence about the buboes. They understood that buboes were the physical manifestation of this illness. They knew that it was something that was incredibly transmissible through people. They learned all of this in quite a quick succession. So they did learn quickly and they did put measures in place, I don't think are really that dissimilar to the measures that we put in place in the 21st century.
- [43:43]
Maddy Pelling
It's a funny balance, isn't it, of common sense, what seems to us to be common sense and then some, as you say, Anthony, quite cruel measures, really, bricking people up inside their homes. And I'm just wondering, Helen, what's the weirdest thing you've come across people doing to try and avoid catching the plague? Do people behave in strange ways? Maybe not across. Across Europe, but have you come across individuals doing odd things?
- [44:05]
Helen Carr
Yeah. So people eating strange things. People would eat odd foods. There's an account that came out of Aleppo in Syria. So they would smear their buboes with clay. They would sort of spray perfumes to an incense around their homes, like camphor and sandal. Oh, and there's another one that is if you put onions, vinegar and sardines to together as part of a daily meal that apparently had some kind of repellent. But I'm Guessing because of the smell.
- [44:33]
Maddy Pelling
Nobody's snogging you after you've had that, let's be honest.
- [44:36]
Helen Carr
No. And there's no smints in the 14th.
- [44:39]
Maddy Pelling
Century, that's for sure.
- [44:40]
Helen Carr
So. But yeah, there were lots of different natural remedies that they thought could help, but in the end it's, you know, it's why modern medicine is just such a gift.
- [44:48]
Anthony Delaney
Helena, it'd be really interesting before we kind of wrap up, just to talk about what life after 1351 started to look like. Now we know that this isn't the last time the plague reappears, but how do people start to return to normality and what does that look like for them? Has normality changed? Is this a different world they're entering into in 1351, or is it business as usual?
- [45:11]
Helen Carr
I think a combination of the both. It's really strange and obviously in many ways this is entirely incomparable. And sometimes I think it's very basic to try and compare plague to Covid, but if you think about how naturally we returned to life, it's almost as if, oh yeah, that weird time that we were locked away for two years, like we're all aware of it and it's part of our sort of daily lexicon, but it's not something that we have just sort of gone through and carried on. I think there is an element of human nature that does just carry on. It's how we survive, it's how we, we continue to exist as a species. And with regard to the plague, there were great changes, the largest of which is this completely removal of a social class of the serfdom. As I mentioned before, this sense of a fatalistic existence ceased to exist. You had much more growth in merchant classes. So the merchant class became a hugely important social group and they had a lot of power and influence. And by the end of the 14th century, they were involved in government, they were loaning money to the king and the crown. They were a really important and incredibly powerful and quite large group of people that really developed and emerged after the Black Death. There has been a so called golden age, particularly for women, because more men initially died, particularly in the first wave of plague, than women did. And so women were stepping into traditional roles of men. So they were becoming armorers or they were becoming butchers, and they were moving out of the home and they were working effective shop fronts and they had their children, their family around them, but they were working as individual traders. You Pham Sol, which was sort of a single woman, you saw an Increase of the farm sol traders. And what is interesting as well is the development of ale drinking. The Brewsters. So women were traditionally used to brew ale. They were called Brewsters. They used to do that from inside the home. And instead they went out and created, effectively, what we call now breweries. And so they were working in these warehouses together. You saw the advent of horology, so clocks. You started to see clocks in more locations in your parish. And certainly this was happening in Italy as well. Clocks would often be placed. It was like an age of innovation. It was technology. There were fewer people to do things by hand, so they had to think of innovative ways to do it. So it's a little bit like the mill, so grinding the grain for bread, they had. The water mill started to come into fruition. So you saw increase of water mills because they just had fewer hands. So they had to think of ways to make things happen faster. So it was an incredibly innovative time. So there was a lot more of that. Yes, this rise of technology. So you'd have the tolling of the church bell. You'd also have the clock opposite the church, and you people would be able to start telling the time. And I think that in many ways, it sort of gave rise to a different type of Renaissance. It was like a new age of existing and being and a development of these great technologies. A literary boom saw people start. Started talking the vernacular, particularly in England. It was just the absence of people in a sort of nutshell and in a very basic way, made people think harder.
- [48:27]
Anthony Delaney
Two takeaways from this. First of all, I think some of the most exciting, if not the most exciting work on medieval period is being now done by female historians. And I think the injection of female voices is bringing a whole new audience to this period. It's also telling these histories in a whole new way, nuanced, dare I say it, way. And I just think it's time for the women to lead on medieval history. And that's why I think books like Femina, books like your book, they're just so timely and so important that those voices are being heard now. So it's very exciting.
- [49:03]
Helen Carr
I think women look at the record differently and every. I mean, everyone comes to the record with their own bias, don't they, in their own sense of the world. But women look at sources and they read them differently. So in this book, there is a case where for years, it's always written, been written in the record that a woman was lying because it's been written by men. She's lying. She's lying. She's lying. She said she, you have to, you have to buy the book to read it. But she said this. But actually it turns out when I read it back, I was like, she wasn't lying. So this case, a woman thought she was pregnant and they were saying she was lying. She couldn't have been pregnant. And actually I realized, looking at it from a different perspective, that she had an early case of pseudo cisis, which is a well known biological and mental condition which is where your body shows all the signs of pregnancy, but you're not actually with child. And she had been told throughout her life and then as it had been written, the historical records thereafter that she was lying. And I don't think she was.
- [50:04]
Anthony Delaney
Yeah, that's so human. I think as well. And this is kind of what I mean by that nuance thing. The other thing I will take as well. I don't know why I find this so fascinating. You know, they sometimes you just hook onto a very small detail. But the idea that clocks start appearing more after the Black Death for some.
- [50:18]
Maddy Pelling
Reason, that's Anthony's major takeaway.
- [50:20]
Anthony Delaney
Honestly, that's really struck with me. I'm like, oh my God, can you imagine if clocks just start popping up in your town and probably not quite in your village just yet. But I'm just like, oh my God. I mean, it just for some reason that changes the world for me slightly.
- [50:31]
Helen Carr
It's like everyone instead, do you know what? We need clocks.
- [50:34]
Anthony Delaney
I'll take a clock, please.
- [50:35]
Maddy Pelling
Okay, so clocks and diversity of historians voices are the major takeaway of this episode. Helen, thank you so much. This has been absolutely fantastic.
- [50:44]
Helen Carr
Well, thank you for having me.
- [50:45]
Maddy Pelling
If people want to pre order your book before it's out, where can they do that?
- [50:49]
Helen Carr
So the best place to do that is good old Waterstones. You can pre order it there or any other place online. But I have to get a big plug for Waterstones because they're very, very nice.
- [50:59]
Maddy Pelling
Fantastic. Well, if you have enjoyed this episode of After Dark, you can get in touch@after darkhistoryhit.com we love to hear from you with suggestions for topics, thoughts on previous episodes and just general feedback. We just love to interact with and get to know our listeners. You can also leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. See you soon.
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