New research maps the devastation of the Black Death on medieval England
An innovative new archaeological study has revealed in detail for the first time how individual towns, villages and hamlets across swathes of medieval England were decimated by the Black Death.
Medieval News
The research, led by Professor Carenza Lewis from the University of Lincoln, UK, drew together data on finds from thousands of test pits excavated in rural locations across the East of England over the past decade.
Using pottery sherds as a proxy for the presence of human populations, Professor Lewis calculated the drop-off in finds after England was struck by the plague epidemic which killed millions of people across Europe and Asia between 1346 and 1351.
The stark results, published in the journal Antiquity, indicate ‘eye-watering’ falls in population within rural communities which are still inhabited today and generally regarded as ‘survivors’ of the Black Death. The new data reveal which places were most severely hit by plague, from the level of individual plots and parishes up to whole towns and counties.
In some locations, such as Binham in Norfolk, Cottenham in Cambridgeshire, Shillington in Bedfordshire, and Great Amwell in Hertfordshire, catastrophic declines exceed 70 per cent.
Data was gathered from more than 2,000 one-metre square test-pits excavated by members of the public under professional archaeological supervision between 2005 and 2014 across the six counties of eastern England. These spanned 55 different rural settlements which are inhabited today (deserted medieval villages were deliberately excluded from the study). Of those 55 locations, 90 per cent recorded a decline in the number of test pits yielding two or more sherds.
Overall there was a decline of 45 per cent in pottery finds between the high medieval (early twelfth to early fourteenth centuries) and the late medieval period (late fourteenth
to late sixteenth centuries) across the area studied.