Black Death is one of the names given to a fearful epidemic which desolated the world from China to Ireland in the 14th century. It raged in England and the rest of Europe in 1348-49, again in 1361-62, and in 1369; and at the time was usually called in England the 'Pestilence' or the 'Great Pestilence.' It is now believed to have been a specially severe visitation of the oriental plague (see PLAGUE), with some special symptoms, mainly boils or buboes on the thighs and arms, and putrid inflammation of the lungs, with vomiting of blood. Its black spots (whence the name) and tumours were the seals of a doom that medicine had no power to avert. In most cases the victims died in two or three days, and sometimes the very day they were stricken.
The pestilence seems to have originated in China, and is said to have been preceded, if not, as was believed, in some measure caused, by strange convulsions of nature—earthquakes, droughts, famines, floods, and swarms of locusts; while its westward course was accompanied by dense and awful fogs, and an apparent inversion of the order of the seasons. There had been a visitation of the ordinary plague in 1342; but it was in 1348 that Europe was terrified by the approach of a wholly unparalleled scourge. In China 13,000,000 were reported to have perished, and 24,000,000 elsewhere in the East. By the northern coast of the Black Sea and Constantinople, the contagion reached the seaports of Italy and Southern France, whence Germany and England were infected. The first English victims succumbed in Dorsetshire in August 1348; but it was not till winter that it reached London by way of Gloucester and Oxford. The havoc was almost incredible, but is well attested. Towns were stripped of their inhabitants; religious houses lost nine-tenths of the inmates. In London 100,000 died, 50,000 being buried in a plot of ground now covered by Smithfield; and Norwich mourned 60,000 deaths. Careful investigators have come to the conclusion that the victims of this one visitation must have comprised one-third if not one-half of the total population of England, which is estimated to have then been from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 in all. For a time Scotland enjoyed immunity, and spoke of the 'foul death of the English;' but ere long, like Ireland, it was also severely visited.
The mortality caused by the plague was only one startling consequence. Religious excitement led to extravagances of fanaticism, especially in Germany, to that of the Flagellants (q.v.); all natural bonds of human society were loosened, so that friend deserted friend and mothers fled from their stricken children, and the demoralisation showed itself in many cases in reckless debauchery. Elsewhere perverted Christian zeal led to frightful persecutions of the Jews, as at Mayence, where 12,000 Hebrews were believed to have been massacred.
But it is only in modern times that the extent of the economic and social consequences of this plague has been fully understood; the black death forms a great economic turning-point in English history. The dearth of labourers caused wages in England to be nearly doubled; law after law was passed to prevent the inevitable rise in the payment of labour; and the ill-feeling thus engendered between landholder and tiller of the soil led to numerous social changes and the rebellion of Wat Tyler. Old methods of culture disappeared; farms on lease largely took the place of great estates managed by bailiffs.
The great pestilence is referred to by Chaucer and Langland; Boccaccio's Decameron gives a singularly vivid view of its ravages in Florence; but see the article PLAGUE in Vol. VIII.; Hecker's Epidemics in the Middle Ages (1843); Creighton's History of Epidemics in Britain (1892); Jessopp's Coming of the Friars (1888); works by Thorold Rogers, Cunningham, Denton (for the economic aspects), and (for subject as a whole) F. Aidan Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (1894).