BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//InvisionCommunity Events 5.0.18//EN METHOD:PUBLISH CALSCALE:GREGORIAN REFRESH-INTERVAL:PT15M X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT15M X-WR-CALNAME:RMCommunityCalendar NAME:RMCommunityCalendar BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London TZURL:https://tzurl.org/zoneinfo/Europe/London X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20250330T020000Z RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20251026T020000Z RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Black Death from Lucy Worsley 05/12/2025 DTSTAMP:20250512T145941Z SEQUENCE:0 UID:274-7-c3fe8195a3dde498d013e477e2142422@aalbc.com ORGANIZER;CN="richardmurray":noreply@aalbc.com DESCRIPTION:\n Black Death from Lucy Worsley\n\n https://www.pbs.org/vid eo/the-black-death-nr73de/\n\n\n\n VIDEO- FULL\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n TRANS CRIPT- FULL VIDEO\n\n\n\n ♪♪ -In 1348\, the Black Death struck the Bri tish Isles and spread like wildfire.\n\nIt's believed to be the most deadl y pandemic in history.\n\nBefore the Black Death\, the population of mainl and Britain was around 6 million.\n\nTwo years later\, only an estimated 3 million were left alive.\n\nWhy did this disease claim so many\, and how did the awful death toll change Britain?\n\nIn this series\, I'm reinvesti gating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.\n \nIt wasn't just one generation.\n\nIt was three generations losing their lives.\n\nBum\, bum\, bum.\n\nThese stories are part of our national mytho logy\, harboring mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.\n\nIt's c hilling to think that this could actually be evidence in a murder investig ation.\n\nBut with the passage of time\, we have new ways to unlock their secrets using scientific advances and a modern perspective.\n\nIt's a horr ible psychosexual form of torture.\n\n-Absolutely.\n\n-I'm going to uncove r forgotten witnesses\, re-examine old evidence\, and follow new clues to get closer to the truth.\n\n-It is one of the great British mysteries.\n\n -It was one of those moments\, I'm afraid\, for a historian that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.\n\n[ Crow caws ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -B ubonic plague\, the pestilence\, the great mortality.\n\nThere's lots of d ifferent names for the Black Death\, infamous for the horrible boils or bu boes that break out on peoples' skin.\n\nIt struck Britain many times\, fa mously in London in 1665.\n\nBut I'm interested in the first and the worst outbreak in 1348 when something like half of the population got wiped out .\n\nI want to investigate how the Black Death transformed society\, what happened to it during and after this terrible medieval pandemic.\n\n♪♪ First\, I want to understand what the Black Death was and why the outbrea k in Britain in 1348 was so deadly.\n\nAfter all this time\, science is st ill uncovering new clues.\n\nStored in this underground vault in London ar e 600 skeletons.\n\nEach box contains the bones of someone buried in a mas s grave at the height of the plague outside the old city walls.\n\nThis pl ague pit was unearthed in the 1980s during building work and excavated by archeologists.\n\nStrangely beautiful thing.\n\n-It is.\n\n-His teeth.\n\n Look at his teeth.\n\n-I know\, they're fantastic\, aren't they?\n\n-Osteo logist Jelena Bekvalac is curator of this collection.\n\nThese are definit ely Black Death victims.\n\nBut for centuries\, science was uncertain what caused the disease.\n\nThen in 2011\, DNA taken from the teeth of these s keletons confirmed what had actually killed them.\n\nThis has been a great mystery\, hasn't it\, for 700 years\, at least.\n\n-Yeah\, we had these i ndividuals\, and then scientists used the DNA analysis recreating and reco nstructing an ancient genome.\n\nAnd by doing that\, they were able to ide ntify that the actual causative agent was a bacteria and it was Yersinia p estis.\n\n-What did you say?\n\n-Yersinia pestis.\n\n-Yersinia pestis.\n\n -Pestis\, yes.\n\n-And why was this particular bacterium quite so dangerou s?\n\n-This one was particularly virulent to us because we\, as a populati on at that time\, had never been exposed to that bacteria.\n\nSo there was no immunity within us.\n\nAnd therefore\, when you're exposed to somethin g that's new\, it really then impacts onto the population.\n\nAnd subseque ntly\, after that episode of the Black Death that we know killed so many p eople\, there were other outbreaks\, but it didn't have that same impact.\ n\n-Because of herd immunity.\n\n-Because of herd immunity\, yes.\n\nSo yo u're building up that lovely sort of immunity to it.\n\n-We all know what herd immunity is now.\n\n-[ Laughing ] Yeah\, yes.\n\n-So just at the mome nt he was going into the plague pit to be buried\, I imagine that he would have had big swelling buboes on him.\n\nIs that right?\n\n-Yes\, that wou ld be where you get the swellings in the armpits and the groins.\n\n-What is that exactly\, these swellings?\n\nWhat was it?\n\nIs there something i nside them?\n\n-Well\, there'd be nasty\, dead cells and pus and poison.\n \n-Ah.\n\n-So very uncomfortable\, be very sore\, probably have horrible h eadaches\, feel very sort of fatigued\, might feel sick\, sweats.\n\nYou'd feel really\, very\, very unwell and under the weather.\n\n-And where did this particular bacterium come from?\n\n-Well\, they believe that it prob ably came from Central Asia and then it would travel across\, because also we have to remember at this time that you've got trade routes and people are moving around\, so you've got quite a lot of movement of people.\n\nSo it probably started from there.\n\n-Emerging global trade routes in the 1 4th century exposed Britain to a deadly new disease.\n\nIt had raged throu gh Asia and Europe\, wiping out millions before arriving on these shores.\ n\nCatch it and you could be dead in days\, even hours.\n\nSo how did this bacterium spread so aggressively and kill so many people?\n\nThere are so me images of life in London that got burned into my mind at an early age\, and this is one of them.\n\nIt's a scene from the kiddie version of the s tory of \"Dick Whittington and His Cat.\"\n\nDick Whittington\, being a la d who came to London to seek his fortune\, but who had to sleep in a horri ble attic infested with rats.\n\nHere they all are running over his bed\, climbing out of the window.\n\nAnd I'm pretty sure it's images like this\, if not this very one\, that made a link in my mind between the spread of the plague and rodents.\n\nBut I agree this isn't exactly solid scientific or historical evidence.\n\nI'm going to have to do better than the Ladybi rd version.\n\nWhat can the latest science tell me about how this disease might have spread?\n\nA study from 2018 argues that the Black Death was al so spread by human fleas and lice\, infecting people as they bit into thei r flesh.\n\nOne of the researchers was epidemiologist Dr. Fabienne Krauer. \n\nShe's in Switzerland\, so this will be an online consultation.\n\nSo\, Fabienne is in my waiting room.\n\nLet me admit her.\n\nThere she is.\n\n Fabienne.\n\nSo there's these human fleas that can take the plague from on e human being to another human being.\n\n-Yes\, it's interesting.\n\nLice and fleas were very common in the 14th century.\n\n-So\, would that be thr ough people's bedding or their clothes\, or how can you see that working?\ n\n-Yeah\, so body lice and human fleas\, they typically live in clothes\, in the seams or in the foldings of clothes.\n\nSo we know that in the 14t h century\, the handing down of clothes\, that was a real thing.\n\nAnd we think that this is how the plague could have spread\, because people were passing on clothes of someone who died of plague\, and then they got them selves infected.\n\n-Mm.\n\nThis is so heartbreaking because people wouldn 't have known\, would they?\n\nThey wouldn't have known that this is how t hey were actually killing their friends and relatives.\n\n-No\, people had no idea.\n\nBut there are also other forms of plague\, such as pneumonic plague\, which is transmitted directly between people through coughing\, t hrough infectious droplets.\n\n-Sorry\, sorry\, sorry.\n\nFabienne\, just for a second\, 'cause this is all so new to me.\n\nYou're taking me into n ew ground here.\n\nDid you call it the pneumonic version of the disease\, like pneumonia?\n\n-Yes\, exactly.\n\nSo pneumonia happens when someone wh o has a plague infection\, when these people cough\, they expel infectious droplets.\n\nAnd these can be inhaled by other people\, which cause prima ry pneumonic plague in these people.\n\nAnd that's a very fatal and rapidl y progressing disease.\n\n-So it spreads -- it can also spread through the air from someone you're living with\, someone you're in the same room as\ , and it's to do with breathing the disease\, one person to another?\n\n-Y es\, it requires rather close contact.\n\nSo it's usually people within th e same household that are infected\, or people who care for someone who is sick.\n\n-That's a horrible idea\, isn't it?\n\nSomeone who's taking care of somebody could be infecting themself through their compassion.\n\n-Yea h\, that's -- that's indeed horrible.\n\nAnd if someone had pneumonic plag ue\, then their fate was basically sealed.\n\nSo they were going to die\, for sure.\n\nAnd the fatality for pneumonic plague was about 100%.\n\n-100 %?\n\n-Yeah.\n\n♪♪ -So much new information here.\n\nI hadn't realized that there were these different variants within plague.\n\nThere's the bu bonic plague\, where you get the swellings in the armpits\, but also the p neumonic plague\, which is lung to lung.\n\nAnd Fabienne's talking about s o many different vectors of transmission.\n\nWe've got the rats and the fl eas.\n\nThere's also body lice and the secondhand clothing and just being together in a small space.\n\nNo one was immune to this disease.\n\nRich o r poor\, young or old\, the Black Death ripped through all levels of Europ ean medieval society.\n\nNow\, what I do know about medieval society is th at at the top of it\, we have the king\, and then below him we have his kn ights.\n\nHere they are.\n\n[ Imitates galloping ] These gentlemen give hi m their loyalty.\n\nHe gives them their land.\n\nBut the vast majority\, 9 0% of the population\, are in fact made up of all these guys\, the peasant s.\n\nAnd most of them aren't free.\n\nThey're tied to the land from which they scratch a living\, land that's owned by the local lord of the manor\ , and the whole of the social structure is reinforced by the church.\n\nEa ch Sunday\, the priest preaches to his parishioners that this is the way t he world is.\n\nThis is God's grand design.\n\n♪♪ How did the Black De ath transform this rigidly structured society?\n\nI want to investigate th e world of the vast majority of its victims\, the rural peasants.\n\nBut c ontemporary descriptions of how they lived can be misleading.\n\nAccording to these images\, it looks rather lovely.\n\nHere's a happy agricultural worker enjoying the spring air\, sowing his seeds in the ground\, surround ed by birds and leaves.\n\nAhh.\n\nAnd here are some farmers bringing in a wonderful crop of corn.\n\nLooks blissful.\n\nBut these images are from t he \"Luttrell Psalter.\"\n\nIt's a really fantastic illuminated manuscript commissioned by Luttrell himself\, a landowner.\n\nHe wanted to make livi ng on the land look like it was a lovely thing to do.\n\nI'm not sure how reliable these images are as a guide to everyday life.\n\n♪♪ Firsthand accounts of 14th century peasant life don't exist.\n\nMost people were il literate.\n\nThere were no gritty life stories to consult.\n\nThough they did pay taxes and rent to their noble overlords.\n\nTo understand how the majority lived 700 years ago\, you follow the money.\n\nIn 14th century En gland\, rural peasants were summoned before a court of the manor on which they lived and worked to pay rent and tax.\n\nThese transactions were reco rded in court rolls\, and they covered every aspect of peasant life.\n\nFi nes were paid for disobedience of any kind\, like leaving the manor withou t permission.\n\nTax was paid on crops grown on the parcel of land you lea sed from the Lord.\n\nWhen you died\, your family paid a death tax to inhe rit the lease on that parcel of land.\n\n♪♪ In the county of Suffolk i n a temperature-controlled vault are some of Europe's rarest medieval manu scripts.\n\nThey're the court rolls of a small Suffolk village called Wals ham le Willows.\n\nI do know my way to the Suffolk Archives 'cause I've be en there before\, but the stuff I normally look at is much later than this .\n\nThese court rolls cover the period before\, during\, and after the Bl ack Death struck England in 1348.\n\nWhat can they tell me about the peasa ntry and the impact of the pandemic on their lives?\n\nOh\, wow\, look\, t hey're all out on the table for me already.\n\nOh\, and aren't they fantas tic?\n\nSo we're looking at lots and lots of very neat Latin here.\n\nIt's so neat\, it's got a sort of Excel spreadsheet quality to it.\n\nBut I kn ow that buried underneath that are real human beings\, even if they're tre ated here as units of taxation\, almost.\n\nNow\, I know that this set of documents is so important because it's so comprehensive.\n\nIt goes on for years and years and years in the same village\, and you don't normally ge t that sort of longitudinal view into the life of a community because one bit might survive\, another bit not.\n\nSo this is just remarkable this\, the completeness of this record for 14th century Walsham.\n\nThe rolls are written in medieval Latin.\n\nFortunately for me\, there's an English tra nslation.\n\nMm\, I did study medieval Latin\, but a long time ago and not very seriously.\n\nSo I'm having to rely on my translation here.\n\nThe p opulation of Walsham prior to the Black Death was around 1\,200.\n\nPlague strikes the village in June 1349.\n\nThe court session for that month sho ws a huge spike in death tax being paid.\n\nAnd it was a very busy court s ession because basically 103 people have all died.\n\nSo that's in the las t three weeks in this particular sitting at the court.\n\nThey had to deal with the business of 103 deaths.\n\nIt's extraordinary.\n\nAnd you can se e that the clerk has run out of room.\n\nHe's gone down the first piece.\n \nHe's had to attach another one to keep going.\n\nAnd what's kind of chil ling is that he doesn't care that these people have died.\n\nWhat he cares about is that there's business to be done\, because every time you die\, when you are a serf\, your family has to pay a tax to the landlord.\n\nAnd that tax is called a heriot.\n\nAnd in some cases\, the heriot is a horse .\n\nAnd in other cases\, it's a yew.\n\nSo basically\, when your father d ies\, you have to give the landlord one of your animals.\n\nThere's clearl y good money to be made.\n\nBut the 103 deaths listed in this court sessio n are just the heads of families.\n\nYounger men\, women\, and children\, a good 80% of the community\, aren't recorded.\n\nThey're not economically relevant to the records.\n\nFactor them in\, and the deaths must number c lose to 600.\n\nSo that's half of the village dying of plague\, matching e stimates for the whole country.\n\nThese rolls of a micro study for all of Britain during the pandemic.\n\nAnd here's a particularly interesting fam ily who are marked out with a cross for some reason.\n\nI can make out the ir name is Cranmer.\n\nThat's William Cranmer\, who's the patriarch of the family.\n\nHe's the granddad.\n\nAnd he held a messuage -- that means a p iece of property\, possibly with a house on it.\n\nAnd it says he also hel d a tenement\, and he's died\, and he has to pay a heriot\, the death tax. \n\nThen his son and heir\, a second generation\, he dies.\n\nAnd then the re's -- and a third generation who die.\n\nHis son Robert dies\, and the h eriot has to be paid.\n\nBut this time\, they haven't got any horses left. \n\nThey have to pay a cow.\n\nIt's a less good animal for that because th e lord's already got the two horses.\n\nThis particular family\, the Cranm ers\, they stand out here because of the awfulness of what happened to the m.\n\nIt wasn't just one generation or two generations.\n\nIt was three ge nerations losing their lives.\n\nbum\, bum\, bum\, all within the same few weeks in the same -- in the same village.\n\n♪♪ The Cranmer clan seem like a typical peasant family.\n\nI want to investigate their life experi ences to understand how Britain was changed by the plague.\n\nArmed with m y copy of the court rolls\, next stop for me is Walsham le Willows.\n\n20 miles inland from the Suffolk coast\, the present day village of Walsham s till clusters around the local church\, Saint Mary's\, just as it did 700 years ago.\n\nSo far\, I've looked at Walsham during the time plague struc k the village.\n\nBut now I'm going to wind the clock back to the years ju st before the Black Death.\n\nWhat was pre-pandemic life like for the Cran mers?\n\nAnd is there any surviving trace of them left today?\n\nI need so me local knowledge.\n\nOh\, hello\, Frances.\n\nIt's Lucy here.\n\nI am in Walsham.\n\nLeft\, and look for the school.\n\nI'm off to see a lady call ed Frances Jenner.\n\nShe's the chairperson of the local history society\, and she's one of those people who says\, \"Oh\, I'm only an amateur histo rian\,\" but actually\, I suspect that she knows everything that there is to know.\n\n♪♪ Like me\, Frances is fascinated by the court rolls of W alsham\, and she's been studying them for years.\n\nIt was pretty agricult ural in the 14th century.\n\nIs it still quite agricultural around here?\n \n-It is very much so.\n\nStill a very rural community.\n\n-So where are y ou bringing me\, Frances?\n\n-I'm bringing you to Cranmer farm.\n\n-Oh\, m y goodness!\n\n-Yes.\n\n-Cranmer farm.\n\nStill got their name on it.\n\n- It does\, yes.\n\n-700 years later.\n\n-It does\, yes.\n\n-Though it's bee n rebuilt since.\n\n-It has.\n\nIt's been rebuilt later\, but they would h ave had a dwelling here\, and they farmed the lands around here.\n\n-Do yo u think they farmed in this very field\, then?\n\nWe're totally in their n eck of the woods?\n\n-Quite possible that they did and that we are actuall y walking on where they farmed and lived.\n\n-Excellent.\n\nAnd having spe nt a lot of time combing through the court rolls\, have you developed in y our mind the character at this William Cranmer\, the eldest one\, the gran ddad of the family?\n\n-I have\, because actually\, if you look at him\, h e actually has more entries than anybody else.\n\nAnd there are lots of in stances of him being fined for various breaches of grazing too many sheep on the verges and all sorts of things.\n\nAnd I just get the impression th at he was a bit of a one\, really.\n\n-Oh\, really?\n\n-I do.\n\n-A sharp operator?\n\n-I think so.\n\nYes\, definitely.\n\nThat's what we would cal l him today.\n\n-Yes.\n\nAnd how hard or difficult do you think the lives of the Cranmers were living here?\n\n-Prior to the Black Death\, there'd b een seven years of famine due to the unseasonably odd weather conditions.\ n\n-Ah.\n\n-Excessive rain storms\, and we have to also remember that in t hose days\, the wheat wasn't the wheat that we know today.\n\nIt was reall y tall\, so storms would basically flatten it and then it would just rot i n the fields.\n\nSo that would mean hardship.\n\nThat would mean no food\, no crops to sell.\n\nThey would still have to pay the taxes to the lord o f the manor.\n\nSo they were being squeezed basically from both sides.\n\n They weren't actually making any money\, but they still had to pay their t axes.\n\nSo life would have been hard.\n\nThey would have been hungry.\n\n They would have been poor.\n\nLife really would have been pretty miserable .\n\n♪♪ -In these years of pre-pandemic hardship\, old William Cranmer is frequently fined for keeping more animals than permitted\, for taking firewood without permission\, even for not informing on a neighbor when th ey break the rules.\n\nWilliam might have a few acres of land\, but there' s three generations\, his son\, his grandson\, and their extended families \, all living on it.\n\nPerhaps there's just too many of them for the land to support.\n\nThe Walsham court rolls list numerous villages in the same situation.\n\nWhile they struggle\, they're also duty bound to work the l ord's personal farmlands as well as their own.\n\nIt's the same across swa thes of Britain\, but as I work through the court rolls\, I come across an other strain on the Cranmer clan's hard-pressed resources.\n\nYou don't of ten get women mentioned in these court rolls because it's mainly about the tenants.\n\nBut if you travel back in time\, we seem to have a granddaugh ter of wily William Cranmer\, the grandfather of the family.\n\nHer name's Olivia.\n\nAnd the reason that she comes up in the court records is becau se of a scandal.\n\nShe's had to pay a child wite\, which is a special fin e of two shillings and eight pence\, and she's had to pay this because she gave birth outside wedlock.\n\nShe's had an illegitimate child.\n\n♪♪ Having a child out of wedlock in medieval society was condemned by the ch urch\, but it wasn't uncommon.\n\nThe problem was more practical.\n\nIt wa s another mouth to feed.\n\nWho would provide?\n\nIn Olivia's case\, it wa s swiftly solved.\n\nShortly after she's fined\, the court rolls record Ol ivia marrying a Robert Hayes\, a peasant with his own land holdings.\n\nWa s Roberts the father?\n\nWas this a forced marriage?\n\nThe rolls make no mention.\n\nNow that I've learned more about the Cranmers\, I'm intrigued to know how they and so many like them reacted as plague approached Britai n.\n\nIn the summer of 1348\, plague had spread across the English Channel aboard trading ships.\n\nContemporary accounts agree that the first outbr eaks in Britain were in Weymouth and Bristol.\n\nThe disease caught fire a nd spread from the coast into the countryside.\n\nNow\, Walsham might feel like it's in the middle of nowhere\, but it isn't\, and it wasn't in the 14th century either.\n\nIt was connected\, as the world was\, through glob al shipping routes.\n\nWalsham is 100 miles away from London\, but crucial ly\, it's only 26 miles\, or a day's walk\, from the international port of Ipswich.\n\nIpswich was just a day's sail from France.\n\nNews of the Bla ck Death's horrors found their way across the channel.\n\nMost accounts co ming from Europe were utterly apocalyptic.\n\nAnd this sounds frankly impl ausible.\n\nHe describes here a rain of frogs\, snakes\, lizards.\n\nand s corpions\, thunderbolts and lightning.\n\nThis sounds like crazy pub talk\ , but then\, much more believably\, he talks about the plague traveling vi a Genovese ships to Marseilles and then to Avignon\, where... Oh\, golly\, where half the people have died.\n\nSo once he's got to France\, that's r oughly only 24 hours journey away from this village\, from this pub.\n\nYo u can imagine people here laughing\, maybe\, speculating\, maybe really fr ightening themselves as they talked about it on a Friday night.\n\n♪♪ Accounts like this reached Britain throughout 1348\, well before the Black Death struck Walsham.\n\nBut is there evidence in the court rolls that ev en rumors about plague changed people's behavior?\n\nHere's a meeting of t he court from the autumn before the Black Death.\n\nAnd here we've got -- how many men?\n\nI think it's -- yes\, it's 11 men in total who are in tro uble 'cause they've not turned up to work.\n\nThey get fined for not doing their duties\, including William Cranmer\, actually.\n\nWhat might they h ave been doing instead?\n\nWell\, this might be in my imagination\, but ju st up here\, we've got some other men who were fined\, who were punished\, for brewing and selling ale in breach of the assize.\n\nI am tempted to t hink that these 11 men thought\, \"Right\, the plague is coming.\n\nWe're jolly well not going to go to work.\n\nWe're going to go to the pub instea d.\n\nLet's make merry\, because tomorrow\, we die.\"\n\n♪♪ It might h ave seemed to many that doomsday was approaching.\n\nHow did those in powe r try to prepare the population for what was coming?\n\nWhat was their mes sage to the people?\n\n♪♪ [ Bells tolling ] Belief in God was central to life in medieval Britain.\n\nEveryone attended church to be guided in a ll things\, both on Earth and spiritually\, by their local priest.\n\nWith rumors of bodies piled up in the streets in the west of England\, in the autumn of 1348\, an official Black Death briefing was made from church pul pits.\n\nThe king\, Edward III\, tells the Archbishop of Canterbury to wri te a letter with instructions for the people.\n\nIt's to be read out from the pulpit across the country.\n\nAnd historians usually called this lette r after its first word\, which is \"terribilis.\"\n\nTerrible.\n\nThis was a mass communication filtered down from king to bishop to priest to peasa nt.\n\n\"Terrible is God towards the sons of men.\n\nHe allows plagues to arise\, to torment men and drive out their sins.\n\nIt is now to be feared that this kingdom is to be oppressed by the pestilence and wretched morta lities which have flared up in other regions.\"\n\nThe message is it's rea l.\n\nIt's here.\n\nIt's coming to get us.\n\nAnd it's coming because you' ve all sinned.\n\nThis announcement affected everyone.\n\nEveryone sinned. \n\nBreaking any of the Ten Commandments was a sin\, but the medieval chur ch was particularly obsessed with fornication.\n\nOlivia Cranmer was fined and would have served penance for having a child out of wedlock.\n\nThere were tens of thousands like her across the country.\n\nThey were an easy target.\n\nSome clergy were quick to blame plague on immoral women and the ir choice of dress.\n\nOkay\, here we got some very naughty\, sexy 14th ce ntury ladies who have got slashes in their dresses\, revealing their figur es and what they've got on underneath.\n\nAnd this lady here\, her robe ha s got great big holes\, enormous arm holes in it\, so you can see her shap e through it.\n\nAnd [laughs] the name of these holes is brilliant.\n\nThe y were known as windows into hell.\n\n♪♪ The Church maintained that on ly prayer could quell God's wrath and stop the pestilence.\n\nBut no amoun t of praying could halt the progress of this terrible disease.\n\nBy Novem ber 1348\, the plague had spread east across England.\n\nAccounts claim th at in Bristol\, only 1 in 10 survived.\n\nPlague had struck London and bro ken out in York.\n\nEverywhere\, communities were decimated.\n\nChurch cem eteries overflowed.\n\nAcross the country\, plague pits were dug.\n\n♪ ♪ This is just the most heartbreaking image.\n\nIt's one of the very ear liest depictions\, it's from 1349\, of a plague pit.\n\nHere are bodies be ing buried.\n\nLook at the grief on the face of this man here with the spa de.\n\nAnd here are crowds of new coffins being brought.\n\nAnd this would have been the scene all over Britain\, all over Europe\, where the plague spread.\n\nAnd to these poor people\, it must have felt like the end of t he world.\n\n♪♪ Getting a decent burial was a hugely important medieva l ritual.\n\nSo plague pits were a shocking and sudden change in this soci ety.\n\nWith people surrounded by so much death\, surely their spiritual b eliefs were shaken.\n\nHow did the church cope during the crisis?\n\nMedie val historian Dr. Claire Kennan specializes in the impact of the Black Dea th on faith and the Church in Britain.\n\nSo Claire\, explain this to me.\ n\nPeople are suffering\, they're praying.\n\nThe prayer isn't working.\n\ n-Mm-hmm.\n\n-But they still go on doing it.\n\nWhy is that?\n\n-So\, in t he 14th century\, everyone's very concerned with the health of their souls .\n\nAnd the belief is that when you die\, you will inevitably spend some time in purgatory\, which really isn't a very nice place.\n\nSo what peopl e want to do is really lessen the amount of time they're going to spend th ere\, and they do that through prayer\, through acts of repentance\, and t hrough giving money to the church.\n\n-So people are saying prayers\, not necessarily to save their life\, but to have a better death?\n\n-Exactly.\ n\n-When the Black Death happens\, then\, how is the church going to respo nd?\n\nWhat are they going to do?\n\nObviously\, you've got a clergy who a re effectively at the front line of this disease.\n\nThey are working with people who are dying from a very\, very transmissible illness.\n\nThey're getting in very close contact.\n\nThey're leaning in to listen to that la st whispered confession.\n\nAnd so we do see a huge number of clergy dying \, approximately 50% generally.\n\nBut in some places\, this is much highe r.\n\nAnd\, of course\, this leads to extreme shortages.\n\n-So there's a big problem here for the church.\n\nHow are they going to solve it?\n\n-Th e church brings in some really interesting emergency measures\, and what I 've got here is actually a papal license\, which is granted to the archbis hop of York so that he can recruit more priests.\n\nAnd it says\, \"Becaus e of the mortality from plague\, which overshadows your province at this t ime\, not enough priests can be found for the cure and rule souls or to ad minister the sacraments.\"\n\nAnd this is actually a list of novices who a re currently being pushed through the system\, if you will.\n\n-So it's so rt of like sending through the medical students to do the work of doctors. \n\n-Exactly\, and what happens is that we actually get quite a lot of com plaints about these new priests.\n\nOne chronicler even says quite scathin gly that they're no better than laymen.\n\nBut it's important to remember that this isn't everyone's experience.\n\nAnd actually what we see during and after the Black Death is people turning to the church\, possibly more than before.\n\nSo we have lots of people going on pilgrimage to earn what I like to think of as brownie points so that when they do die\, they're n ot in purgatory for too long.\n\n-By New Year of 1349\, plague had infecte d so many in London that the English Parliament was prorogued.\n\nIt was s hut down.\n\nFor a moment\, no one\, it seems\, had oversight of the count ry as the Black Death ripped through England.\n\nBy spring\, plague had re ached Wales.\n\nThe cities of Leicester and Lincoln had been struck.\n\nEs timated casualties in Norwich were horrendous.\n\nEvery day\, it was getti ng closer to Walsham.\n\n♪♪ The court rolls suggest plague finally rea ched the village of Walsham in April 1349.\n\nAmong the first to die is Wi lliam Cranmer the elder\, Olivier's grandfather\, swiftly followed by Oliv ia's father and her brother.\n\nThree generations of Cranmers dead in a ma tter of weeks.\n\nFor two months\, the Black Death tore through Walsham.\n \nFamily after family lost loved ones.\n\nAt some point\, Olivia's husband \, Robert\, also succumbs.\n\nBut I can find no mention in the court rolls during these terrible months of Olivia dying along with hundreds of other victims in Walsham\, younger men\, women\, and children.\n\nHer name simp ly isn't mentioned.\n\nIt was a new bacterium.\n\nThere was no herd immuni ty.\n\nPeople didn't really understand how it spread.\n\nBut in any case\, there was no escape.\n\nIf you were a peasant\, you could not leave your community without the permission of your lord.\n\nYou literally had to sta y there\, working the land\, paying your tax\, waiting to see if you'd liv e or die.\n\nBy autumn 1349\, the Black Death was raging in Ireland and No rthumbria.\n\nThen the Scots invaded England\, believing that God had sent the pestilence to punish their English foes.\n\nUnfortunately\, they may have taken plague back to Scotland with them\, where the disease flared up soon after.\n\n♪♪ ♪♪ In 1350\, the Black Death finally died out i n the British Isles.\n\nIn two years\, the pandemic had claimed the lives of up to half the population.\n\nBut eyewitness accounts of what life was like in the immediate aftermath of plague are scant.\n\nThose that survive d are mainly written by clerics.\n\nAnd these rare fragments hint at a ser ious breakdown in society.\n\nNow\, this is one of the best of them.\n\nIt 's by a monk from Rochester.\n\nHis name is William Dean\, and he's writin g in 1350\, so only just after the Black Death.\n\nHe's still very close t o it.\n\nHis work's in Latin\, but here's the translation.\n\nAnd this bit says\, \"Mortality destroyed more than a third of the men\, women\, and c hildren.\n\nAs a result\, there was such a shortage of servants\, craftsme n\, and workmen and of agricultural workers and laborers that a great many lords and people all very well endowed with goods and possessions\, were yet without all service and attendants.\"\n\nWith millions of workers dead \, I want to find out what effect that had on society once the plague had passed.\n\nProfessor John Hatcher is an economic historian at Cambridge sp ecializing in how the Black Death transformed Britain.\n\nJohn\, can you t ell me what happens when potentially nearly half the population of a count ry dies?\n\n-Well\, it's a very special country at the time because of how agricultural it is.\n\nThe land becomes abundant and people become scarce .\n\nSo wages rise because workers are scarce.\n\nAnd the consequence of t hat\, of course\, is the landowners have the threat of a disorderly peasan try demanding far more in pay\, but also they're demanding freedom from se rfdom.\n\nAnd just to quote one of the commentators of the period\, his wo rld was turned upside down.\n\n-You'd think that it would cause total soci etal breakdown and chaos\, but it doesn't really\, does it?\n\n-No\, it do esn't.\n\n-Why?\n\nWhy is that?\n\n-If you compare it with modern times\, what you've got is people\, the bulk of the population\, 80%\, producing t heir own food.\n\n-Oh\, so they -- -They have to plow the land.\n\nThere m ay be death and destruction all around them.\n\nThey have to keep supplyin g their own land.\n\nYou haven't got huge supply lines for the majority of people today.\n\nSociety would collapse because you've got so few people who are actually producing their own subsistence.\n\n-Yes.\n\n-But in thos e days\, of course\, the situation is very direct.\n\n-And what evidence i s there that these people in the labor market were demanding higher wages? \n\n-So\, the scarcity of labor makes itself felt immediately.\n\nPeople c an get work anywhere.\n\nThey can demand the wages that they want\, and th ere's a splendid description of a plowman plowing in the finery of a noble .\n\nHe's been given it.\n\nIt's got a few holes in\, but nevertheless\, t here is\, with his plow in the mud\, wearing the clothes of a nobleman\, a nd the clothes have been handed to him as a bribe to stay in work\, to kee p working.\n\n-Wow.\n\nSo if I were at the peasant level of society\, iron ically\, the Black Death might be good for me if I survived because I'd ha ve more access to more food.\n\n-Yes\, absolutely.\n\nAnd also\, of course \, you inherited the property of your family.\n\nSometimes a large number of family members would die in succession\, leaving a single person with t he property of five or six people beforehand.\n\nIt was a transformation.\ n\n-So did this new normal last?\n\nPerhaps\, as you might expect\, the ru ling classes in England at least tried to make sure it didn't by rushing t hrough a new national statute or law.\n\nThis great long thing here is a c opy of the Statute of Labourers from 1351\, so just after the plague.\n\nT he translation here tells us what it's all about.\n\nIt says\, \"The king and the nobles have passed the statute against the malice of employees who were idle and who were not willing to take employment after the pestilenc e unless for outrageous wages.\"\n\nIt says that they have to take employm ent for the same wages as before\, or else they were going to get imprison ed.\n\nHmm.\n\nAlso says that you're not allowed to leave the town where y ou work to go and work elsewhere in the summer.\n\nBut then they admit tha t this isn't going to work.\n\nYou can go to help with the harvest if you live in Staffordshire\, Lancashire\, Derbyshire\, Wales\, or Scotland.\n\n That is going to be needed to make the country work.\n\nWith the ruling cl asses trying to reinstate the old social order\, but with the peasants gai ning opportunities for a new life\, what does this mean for farming commun ities like Walsham?\n\nAnd what happened to Olivia Cranmer?\n\nI know that all the male members of her family are dead.\n\nBut Olivia survives.\n\nA single entry in the Walsham court rolls describes her fate.\n\nThe lord o f the manor wants rent and tax from the Cranmer lands.\n\nSo a radical dec ision is made.\n\nOlivia is listed as heir and granted tenancy of around 4 0 acres of the Cranmer holdings.\n\n♪♪ Now\, I had been thinking of Ol ivia as a sort of a freak accident.\n\nIf this were a newspaper headline\, it might say\, \"Amazing -- Walsham woman does well out of Black Death.\" \n\nBut have a look at this.\n\nYou go through the court rolls\, there are lots of other examples of women inheriting land from men.\n\nHere we've g ot Agnes Wodebite and Catherine Dethe\, and over here we've got Alice Ramp olye\, and these women's names were appearing for the first time because f or the first time\, they're economically relevant.\n\nAnd I'm wondering if this is happening on a super local level in Walsham\, what's happening ac ross the nation?\n\nIs it possible there's evidence for other women coming out of the shadows\, if you like\, in the wake of the Black Death?\n\nPro fessor Caroline Barron has done extensive research into opportunities for women in post-plague London.\n\n-Inevitably\, there was a great deal of co nfusion afterwards\, but gradually\, what you see is that women are emergi ng\, holding down jobs\, being apprenticed as girl apprentices to men and to women\, taking over workshops and running them as successful enterprise s after the Black Death.\n\n-So where a business owner had died\, his wife might sort of be forced economically to take it over.\n\n-Yes\, and you f ind after the Black Death that the city expects a widow to continue to tra in her husband's apprentices\, and they encouraged her to run his business .\n\nAnd in fact\, they actually made it possible for a woman who was a wi dow to become a free woman of London and have the economic privileges that a freeman of London would have had.\n\n-Interesting.\n\nAre there specifi c women that you've been able to research?\n\n-Well\, in the immediate aft ermath of the Black Death\, quite interestingly\, William Ramsay was the c hief mason of the king\, the master Mason.\n\nHe died in the Black Death\, and his daughter\, called Agnes\, clearly took over the business from him .\n\nWe find her running his workshop\, and although she was married\, she kept her own name\, or her father's name\, and ran the father's business. \n\n-Wow.\n\n-And she is called Dame Agnes Ramsay in the records.\n\n-That 's extraordinary.\n\n-They sort of recognize this position that she's achi eved.\n\nSo it shows you that women could do things.\n\n-Amazing.\n\nWhat' s this record you've got here?\n\nDoes this tell one of their stories?\n\n -Yes.\n\nThis is the indenture of Margaret\, the daughter of Richard Bisho p of Seaford\, near Lewes.\n\nAnd she's apprenticing herself to a man call ed John Pritchett\, citizen and tollester\, which means a toll collector\, of London\, and burgher.\n\nHis wife\, a tilde maker\, which is a tent ma ker.\n\n-A tent maker.\n\nShe's going to learn to be a tent maker.\n\n-She 's going to learn the craft of the said burgher\, so it's quite specific.\ n\nAlthough she's apprenticed to the husband and wife\, it says she's goin g to learn the craft of the wife and to be the apprentice.\n\n-Was this a bit like during the World Wars of the 20th century?\n\nThe men weren't the re and the women had to take over?\n\n-Absolutely.\n\nIt's like the muniti ons factories in the First World War or Rosie the Riveter in the Second Wo rld War in America.\n\nIt's all to do with a shortage of population.\n\n-A s a new disease\, the Black Death's impact was horrific.\n\nAnd for a shor t while\, the death of half the population saw social order upended.\n\nBr itain's peasant class tasted freedom and empowerment\, and despite efforts to return things back to pre-plague conditions\, many had seen their pros pects change fundamentally\, none more so than Olivia Cranmer.\n\nShe does well enough out of her inherited land to retire with a pension in later l ife.\n\nShe never remarried.\n\nThe court rolls now name her Olivia of Cra nmer\, and it looks like she may have lived into her 60s\, a ripe old age for the 14th century.\n\nPlague would return to 14th century Britain.\n\nW ith each new wave\, herd immunity built up\, but it took 300 years for Bri tain's population to get back to pre-pandemic levels\, and the psychologic al impacts of the Black Death lasted generations.\n\nThis image is the \"D anse Macabre.\"\n\nIt's one of the iconic images of the Black Death\, isn' t it?\n\nSkeletons enjoying themselves.\n\nIt's really striking to me that it dates from well over a century after the Black Death of 1348.\n\nI thi nk it shows the lasting psychological impact of the plague\, which kept co ming back and back again\, and it made people re-evaluate life.\n\nIf life was a dance with death\, if death could come and take you at any moment\, well\, then better enjoy life while you can.\n\n-\"Lucy Worsley Investiga tes\" is available on am*zon Prime Video.\n\n♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪\n\n DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250512 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR