Kevin's Watch

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/aug/05/medie ... don-graves

Interesting story. This must have affected a large part of the globe.

Quote: "When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons"

The Black Death (thought to be two kinds of plague) was 1384/5.

Contemporary evidence: "In 1258, a monk reported: "The north wind prevailed for several months… scarcely a small rare flower or shooting germ appeared, whence the hope of harvest was uncertain... Innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were found lying all about swollen from want… Nor did those who had homes dare to harbour the sick and dying, for fear of infection… The pestilence was immense – insufferable; it attacked the poor particularly. In London alone 15,000 of the poor perished; in England and elsewhere thousands died."

Fascinating, thanks.

--A

Hashi Lebwohl wrote:I saw a documentary where a couple of researchers now think that the Black Death was some sort of hemorrhagic influenza because of the speed with which it spread, hitting even remote villages with little contact outside the surrounding villages. Isolated communities like this should have been relatively immune to a bacterial plague, which spreads more slowly. The whole "fleas on rats" idea was one researcher's guess from the 1880s (or something like that) but he didn't take into account the fact that the rat population wouldn't have spread out at the rate the disease did. A flu virus, though, could be airborne and hit quickly.

I haven't seen that, but I read two very good books on the Black Death, one based on two villages where the manorial records have survived both before and afterwards. It was then thought that the two types of plague were 1. Bubonic (hence the "black death" - black buboes) and 2. Pneumonic, as some of the victims had breathing problems without the buboes. This second was the one very few recovered from. It started in England in Bristol in 1384 (rats on ships?) having galloped through Europe, and spread quite slowly up to the north of England. I believe London had 2 attacks. The symptoms don't seem right for influenza.

But the Pneumonic one would be consistent with an air-vectored illness, even if not influenza per se.

--A