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A few single events in English history have been both sudden and enormously important. English history without the battle of Hastings and the consequent imposition of a new Norman aristocracy, or without the battle of Saratoga, and the consequent loss of the American colonies, would be unimaginably different. The Black Death of 1349 is a turning point of a different but equally decisive kind. It initiated a long period in which the basic material forces working on society were different from what they had been in the central Middle Ages, and this change had profound effects on almost every aspect of history in the century after. The first plague of 1349 was unmatched in its ferocity but it began a long period, ending only with the Great Plague of London in 1665, in which pestilence frequently recurred; during the centuries of the Renaissance and Reformation men lived in terror of this common scourge. The age of plague began quite suddenly with the Black Death and it quickly altered the climate and tendencies of English history.

The bubonic plague, which was carried by black rats and had already ravaged much of the continent of Europe, probably appeared at Melcombe Regis in the summer of 1348. In that year and the next it spread through England like a forest fire, killing large numbers of people in every part of the country. Though we are suspicious of the hysterical entries of chroniclers, in this case they were justified; monasteries were sometimes nearly wiped out. In the diocese of Lincoln, which stretched from the Humber to the Thames, just over 40 per cent of the beneficed clergy died. In 1361 the scourge returned in the 'Second Pestilence', or 'Pestilence of the Children', as it was sometimes called, because it particularly attacked the young rather than those who had perhaps acquired an immunity in surviving the earlier plague; and it recurred in 1368 and 1375. After this it became increasingly frequent and also less severe, until in 1454 William Paston could write fairly calmly that he was retiring into the country to avoid an outbreak in London: plague had become one of the accepted hazards.

Apart from the catastrophic mortality of 1349 itself, the plagues caused a long decline in population. England in the reign of Edward II, we have seen, was a heavily populated country in which cultivable land was scarce. In the fifteenth century it was quite different. We do not know exactly how much of this change was due to the plague; the great floods and famines of the years 1315-17 had perhaps been the turning point which ended the medieval expansion of population. In the over-populated England of 1315 many people must have lived on plots of land which could barely support them, or on barely adequate wages, so that they were very vulnerable to any natural calamity. Population growth may have been halted by the natural limits of subsistence. But there is little doubt that plague was the main factor in causing a steep fall in population. No one compiled population statistics in the Middle Ages, but we can tell from the changes in wages and prices that men must have been scarcer in the fifteenth century. And there are also the tangible evidences of abandoned villages. . .

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