As the disease spread across Italy, each city tried to prevent their neighbours from approaching, but it seemed impossible to stop. Some became fatalistic, and Orvieto’s Council of Seven decided to ignore the coming plague in case it scared people. Six of them died of the disease. In Ragusa the city government concluded that all they could do was order everyone to make a will.
Now in late 1348 the illness spread across England, averaging a mile a day, and the death rates were apocalyptic in parts: 80% were killed in Jarrow in County Durham. At one point, 200 a day were dying in London, a toll proportionately equivalent to 20,000 a day today. The city was described as a “Nomanneslond”, the sort of 28 Days Later ghost town scenario we associated with plague.
Almost everywhere in Europe suffered death rates of between one-third and a half, although pockets of Bohemia and Poland escaped; Italy perhaps suffered the worst, with up to 60% dead. Venice lost as many as three-quarters.
In contrast, Milan perhaps had higher survival rates, because its rulers, the ruthless Visconti family, ordered that any house where the plague was identified be boarded up and its inhabitants left to starve. In a later outbreak the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, initiated the rule that all ships stay anchored for 40 days — quaranta — a sensible measure that appreciated the potential length of incubation periods.
Yet no one really knew much else. In October 1348, the King of France asked the leading thinkers at the University of Paris for their theories about what was causing the disease. Their best guess was that it was due to “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius”.
In other words, no one had a clue; inevitably, though, many blamed the disaster on loose morals, and such abominations as people dressing in sexually provocative clothes. Many countries introduced strict laws against gambling, prostitution and cohabiting, while Philip VI of France ordered for blasphemers to have their upper lip cut off. More tragically, many looked for scapegoats — firstly lepers, and then, more violently, Jews, with pogroms spreading across France and Germany.
A second outbreak of the Plague struck Europe in 1361, known as the Mortality of Children as it especially killed the young, who had acquired no immunity from the first outbreak. Plague returned from time to time but eventually died out in Europe, the Marseilles outbreak of 1722 being the last. Most likely the pestilence-carrying black rat was driven out by its cousin the brown rat.
There have been other pandemics, the worst of all being smallpox, which has killed hundreds of millions. Even in the 20th century, it cost far more lives than all wars combined. There is also influenza — first named in the 14th century but only really a problem since the 16th — which has produced various deadly strains. The 1889 pandemic, which originated in Russia, killed a huge number of notable individuals, including the second in line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor.
Most recently the Spanish Flu of 1919 killed as many as 100 million. Yet like the previous strain, it barely made any impact on the public consciousness, perhaps because it followed such a traumatic war.
Only the Black Death seared itself into the public consciousness, partly because of the social impact it had. In Paris a chronicler recorded that “those who were left drank, fornicated or skulked in the cellars according to their inclinations”. In Florence people were terrorised by the becchini, grave diggers whose motto was “Those who live in fear die” and drank and stole with abandon. In Venice criminals roamed the street because their jailors were all dead; everywhere crime increased, as did pregnancies.
The outbreak also led to growing anger at the authorities, especially the Church, which was already attracting criticism because of its great wealth. Clergymen were disproportionately hit by the disease, because they had to administer the Last Rites to the sick; those that survived tended to be the least diligent. Afterwards, totally unsuitable candidates were rushed in to replace them — often widowed men, teenagers or even petty criminals.
Anarchic new religious groups sprang up, the most notorious being the Brethren of the Cross, or Flagellants — fanatics who went from village to village where they would form a circle, confess their sins, then ritually beat themselves with a scourge made of iron spikes and needles. Soon they turned on Jews, priests and other figures of authority. There was also the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in a state of grace and so it was fine for them to have guilt-free sex and even steal stuff.
The disease had broken down normal restraints and barriers, and had even led to a breakdown in authority where the aristocracy had fled. By being able to leave cities, aristocrats had much lower death rates, one-quarter dying compared to half of peasants. And so an English ploughman’s wage went up from 2 shillings to 10 shillings by 1350, when craftsmen’s real incomes were three times what they were in 1300.
Authorities brought in various laws setting a maximum wage but they were widely ignored, and by the 1370s, 70% of legal business in English courts involved labour legislation. Authorities in Gloucestershire even built stocks to imprison those who took higher wages — but they had to pay the carpenter who built it 5 1/2d a day, twice the legal limit.
Lords were forced by labour shortages to ease the various onerous labour demands they made of their peasants, and so serfdom eventually disappeared. Before that happened, though, increasingly oppressive measures by the crown to put uppity peasants back in their place provoked an uprising in Essex and Kent. Somewhat less directly, chronic lack of manpower also spurred technological innovation, and may even have led to the invention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg the following century.
Without tempting fate, coronavirus isn’t going to be 28 Days Later, but neither is it just the regular flu, and it is bound to have a social impact. Perhaps it will increase pressure for reform in China and Iran, for example, or speed up the decoupling of the global economy. In the US universal healthcare may become a more urgent issue, especially if the country is badly affected and the prohibitive cost of testing is implicated.
More generally, it may spark more irritation with the sort of complacent, high-status, FT-reading brahmins who comprise our modern clergy, the sort of people who like to explain how the world is divided into open vs. closed —because they’re the least vulnerable to open systems.
Their complacency on this issue arguably echoes their complacency about globalism generally, and an inability to see what really matters. From the time the virus first emerged, we’ve heard the same sort of platitudes we’re told about everything else: how the biggest danger facing us is ‘prejudice’ — not the actual fatal disease — and that the coronavirus “knows no borders”.
By contrast, those on the outside Right have noted how open societies seem especially vulnerable to a disease of globalisation, and the political alignment of a worldwide pandemic becomes obvious.
Contagious diseases historically raised fear of the outgroup, and already we have seen low-level violence against east Asians in Italy. We’re not going to get pogroms now, partly because children are largely unaffected — the fatality rate for the 0-9s in China still 0 per cent of the 416 confirmed cases —and that’s what really drives terror, but plagues do draw out our most atavistic fears. There is a theory that xenophobia is an evolutionary response to pathogens, since strangers are more likely to carry diseases that the in-group has no immunity to, and that’s why conservatives respond more strongly to disgust and value purity and cleanliness.
If the disease spreads, due to a failure to take measures quickly enough, then it will only increase people’s problem with globalisation. Alternatively, the lesson might be, as with aircraft safety, that well-co-ordinated international groups of experts are pretty effective at dealing with major problems, and should therefore be given more power. Although a pessimistic Tory, I’m certainly hoping for a Pinkerite Whiggish outcome.
One important change might be the way we see the least valued members of society. Our economy is especially vulnerable because, with three-quarters of children having two working parents, once the schools are shut then a huge chunk of the workforce needs to become “economically inactive”, as the government describes childcare. With communal clubs not an option, people my age would normally recruit their parents into babysitting duties, but for an illness that kills maybe one in six old people, that’s too much of a risk.
Perhaps, just as the Black Death perversely raised the value of the peasantry, so coronavirus will do the same for the elderly. Already people up and down the country are checking up on parents to make sure they’ve got alcohol spray, masks and gloves, and protect themselves from the virus. Already the illness has brought about a small cultural change.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeTwo and a half weeks after this article was published, it seems like we in the UK are only just beginning to wake up to the unprecedented long-term impact this outbreak is going to have on all of our lives.
To my mind, this pandemic is just another of the various ways in which the planet is trying to get our attention and ask us to consider some serious questions. If our hope is to return to business as usual once the peak is past, we may as well be climbing back onto the tracks in the sure and certain knowledge that there will soon be another oncoming train, and another, and another.
Thanks for that observation Rob. I think the emphasis on history to guide us to understand what the future will bring is misplaced. Your picture of a sequence of trains coming down the track to mow us down is entirely relevant. We need to recognise who is telling us that getting back on the track to normal is our route to heaven and educate the population of the inevitability of the train service schedule.
There are key differences of COVID-19 to appreciate compared to past worldwide epidemics (vice “pandemics”). Whereas the Bubonic Plague paved the way for advances in government, science, and labor rights, COVID-19 has paved the way for governmental abuse, election fraud, and tyranny.
Prior histories of disease are indeed examples of uncoordinated approaches to true epidemics which demonstrate a legitimate risk. The mitigation of polio and other debilitating and deadly diseases through science and sanitation are examples of effective coordinated responses. Current COVID over-reaction, however, is a manipulation of the coordinated approach. With COVID, historical fear, a weaponized virus, and inaccurate models were used to present a false narrative; science is being further suppressed and denied to sustain that fear and allow the implementation of policies that change world economies and institutions. Is COVID-19 “an illness that kills maybe one in six old people” when the average age of “COVID-deaths” is above the average life expectancy? What is the real cause of this “crisis”? The changes to counting methods? The use of PCR tests which are completely unsuitable to disease testing? The policies of lockdowns and mask-use that are counter to scientific reality and result in risks from other health concerns to include stress disease and suicide?
Like any tool, disease can be harnessed for good and for evil, and COVID-19 is truly unlike any “disease” the world has yet known.