1352: The Mystery Of The Black Death Woman | Medieval Dead | Chronicle

[Music] the mid-1300s in the small yorkshire town of tadcaster in northern england [Music] by a simple shallow grave a body is prepared for burial there are no grave goods to accompany this person on the last journey to the afterlife perhaps just a plain shroud there are no clues as to who this person was nor what has taken their life [Music] now a team of archaeologists investigate they'll use all their experience and a range of techniques the latest advances in genetic research and hard work in the ground a lot of people were killed in and around tutcaster they'll try to discover who was this person how did they die and what can their remains tell us about life more than 600 years ago there was less fear of death and more acceptance that it was going to happen until now the truth was known the medieval world the 5th to the 15th century a team of archaeologists investigates medieval life by exploring the world of the medieval dead we have a classic view of the storybook medieval life we don't hear the stories about the common man trying to keep his family in our stores there are hundreds if not thousands of skeletons archaeologically speaking we now focus in on the you're looking for clues in the skeleton all the time and you couldn't help almost look through their eyes the seventh year after it began it came to england and first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts in dorsiture where as in other counties it made the country quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive and finally it spread over all england and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive so a chronicler wrote of what befell england in the 14th century it was a pivotal time in the middle ages across the whole of europe the medieval town of tadcasting 15 miles south of york in northern england was no exception the yorkshire landscape is prosperous now but unveils the many years of hardship and suffering that ordinary people endured just to get through their daily lives the average life expectancy was around just 30 years things then were bad enough without war poverty famine and disease it's all dirty backgrounds people walking around in the mud the dirt and the lower echelon of societies is rough in it and it wasn't very pleasant it's easily a third world environment as we would see it today people live in it a subsistence level hand-to-mouth um farming at a very basic level even when they farm for somebody else the majority of the the crop would go to the church in the states so again it goes back up out of their system a lot of medieval aspects of archaeologies knights armor the conflict rather than focusing at the top end of society we can now focus on the bottom end of society the people who lived and worked on the land at a very very basic level we can do scientific analysis on their skeletal remains on their teeth to find out where they were born where they were brought up and what sort of food they yet and so it's a subsistence level we can now record that and we can see exactly how they lived and what they went through and sometimes even how they died the medieval dead still exist around the united kingdom skeletal remains are kept for future study in our stores in england there are hundreds if not thousands of skeletons that have not been analyzed yet many of them were excavated in the 60s and 70s some are still even unwashed but these skeletons still warrant analysis the university of york's department of archaeology preserves many such skeletons the remains of some of the population of medieval yorkshire the medieval period is very interesting because there are lots of aspects still that we don't know so much about and it's fascinating to find out more about it are documents that might emulate a propaganda or political intrigues and so on that distort the actual evidence and when we have the skeletons themselves and the archaeology itself we can see what really happened in the medieval period i think i think the general public is surprised that there's still so much to be left to be discovered about the medieval period people relate to other people so the medieval skeletons are very fascinating to the general public in the medieval period you see very different diseases that you might than compared to the post-medieval period or the early medieval period or the roman period and you tried to think about the social context whether they were from a richer side or a less well-off site and then you try to look for patterns whether there was malnutrition at the site if it was a poorer site or whether they were all very tall people on a wealthier side so you try to put the skeleton straight away into its archaeological context the medieval period is clearly a very great distinction between different classes and between different social status of individual but also a total misunderstanding of diseases and also their cures marlin is often called in to carry out analysis on bones found at the many archaeological sites in and around york and all over the uk her work entails establishing all the facts she can about an individual who lived hundreds of years ago from the bones they leave behind i'm an osteoarchaeologist and what we do is we visually analyze the skeleton so we determine the age the sex the living height and any diseases the person suffered from or any injuries they suffered from it's usually not possible to tell the cause of death and then there are specialists who undertake biomolecular studies of human skeletons and they can determine much more about the diet of the person by undertaking destructive analysis of the teeth and bones and they can also often tell where an individual came comes from through isotope analysis among the breakthroughs in biomolecular research is dna analysis this is revolutionizing osteoarchaeology unlocking whole new areas of potential for the study of skeletal material in future there will be these this new generation dna analysis which are called snips where you can determine the eye colour the hair color whether somebody had a coffee allergy and where almost exactly somebody came from but that's something in the future that we can do with these assemblages that are still stored in british museums most of the skeletons she analyzes come from sites where the archaeology is already understood often as part of a batch of several sets of remains from a recognised burial context such as a conventional cemetery but sometimes there's a skeleton that carries with it a little more mystery tadcaster has seen centuries of conflict [Music] a castle once stood here from the days of the normans though it was a ruin for most of the medieval period not far from the town's main church the site has lain for centuries as waste ground raids from the north battles in the middle ages and the english civil war have all left their mark on the area while the castle hill site has remained empty and largely free from modern building few people ever realized though that it was a place of death richardson was just a boy here when one school holiday he heard that a grim discovery had been made in the garden at castleville it sparked in him a lifelong passion for history and archaeology i when i was 11 years old i asked the landowner or the homeowner if i could have a look around the garden people said that this undulating landscape was a roman castle but it wasn't a roman castle even at 11 years old i knew it was a mutton burley from around the period of the norman conquest the chapel had the garden he let me look around i came back a few more times one particular day showed me some photographs and they were talking 1975 when i was 11. my eyes were so lit up the photograph of skeletons which had uh had been had been excavated from his garden just over over here in fact and i missed the excavation by a few months and it turns out he'd found he found a bomb whilst digging a small vegetable patch um it went to the police and then to the coroner and they decided that there were human remains it was a it was a bone from the arm the remains had found were very very old they investigated a few areas within the garden and i think they turned up about 12 12 individuals i remember one specific photograph and it was of a skull and it had a rhomboid hole in the side of its head which is like a sort of a squat diamond shape so it was all very very interesting and i came for quite a number of years and i was found a large number uh a large amount of pottery mainly medieval but quite a bit of roman i also found some musket balls um which had been eroding out of the slope uh on the motto over there and they were from the battle of tag caster which was 1643. as simon's enthusiasm for archaeology grew he kept going back to castle hill to help where he could as the local historical society explored the site but then almost two decades went by and after a change in ownership simon found the site little resembled the place he knew from childhood quite some number of years later i came back to the garden and i was totally taken aback by what i saw the garden was completely overgrown i was asked to come down and clear the grounds it was a huge task and it took some weeks one of the first things i did was remove a large hemlock plant which is a very poisonous plant which had grown just to the other side of the yew tree there so just a fairly shallow depth i got under the roots and i spurred just caught on something which i thought was a stone but it turned out to be a skull it was a completely unexpected find and it left simon wanting to find out more there was no evidence as to when the body had been buried though there was one possible clue as to the individual's fate a small trauma mark on the skull about 96 the mass grave was found at towton at townton hall i saw some photographs of some of the skulls which had been excavated at towton and they had in the side of the head these rhomboid-shaped hulls simon had heard of the excavations at touton battlefield where tim sutherland had been at work to recover the remains of victims of the battle in 1461. remembering the school with a rhomboid hull in the side of its skull and the ones at towton so putting two and two together what i'd found there might have been a victim from from the battle of town so then i got in touch with tim several of the skeletons had trauma marks including rhomboid holes thought to have been caused by warhammers or pollaxes could the skull belong to a combatant who'd fled the battle during the route and was killed or died of wounds at tabcast in 2009 tim and simon carried out an excavation on the spot where simon had found the skull they unearthed the rest of the skeleton and several more partial skeletons it seemed as if the site had been used as a cemetery yet intriguingly this was outside the bounds of the nearby medieval churchyard it wasn't straightforward though many of the remains were less than ideally preserved when we carried out the excavation we came down onto several uh skeletons but they're all very fragmentary or in not very good condition and then we came down on this one skeleton was in good condition and there was more of it showing than the others and so we thought right it was quite robust person this this bone was in really good condition so we thought right this is the one that we'll try to find out more about and so we fully excavated it and record it and pulled it out the ground and we thought right this hopefully will be a good enough sample to represent the other skeletons that we found in the whole of the site recording data about the location orientation and potential age of the burial was vital if clues were to be gathered that could help explain the strange burial we're assuming that this one skeleton is representative of everybody in this get this cemetery because it's in a strange location it's in the middle of a medieval castle that was um falling into ruins and there was a cemetery a perfectly good cemetery just down the hill that they should have really been using so why weren't they using that and also some people are buried face down some people are buried face up most of them are east west but they all seem to be in little groups as if they've been rushed the burial of the barrels have been rushed so there's something very unusual going on was it possible that the grave was conflict-related like the one at towton tim needed to consider the many layers of history affecting tadcaster to try and understand the confusing nature of the archaeology at castle hill we have an anomaly that we have skeletons in the ground and we thought it'd be easy enough we excavated them usually we can date them by the associated pottery or whatever and therefore you can apply it period and then you can hypothesize that they were killed in a civil war or they were romans or whatever or vikings and then what happened was that the context they were in was completely undecipherable and so what we needed to to fix them anchored down to a period it was a dating mechanism that's really clear doesn't it well that was yeah we couldn't even walk over there could we there are big trees on there they're all gone it's really hard yeah look at that several years after the excavation simon and tim return to castle hill the site has changed a lot since they were here just as it's done throughout its history over hundreds of years you remember when we first came in here that tree the half of it was almost covered in brambles wasn't it yeah between that tree and that tree there was hardly any space at all and right out here so it was a huge yeah huge big brambles and also the big uh rabbit warren underneath on this piece of ground we've got basically we've got evidence of roman remains potentially a fort or a fortlet it's something that was guarding the river crossing here we've got bits and pieces that might be anglo-saxon uh and then we're into the 11th century when for some reason there was a castle built on this site the classic mountain bailey small mountain bailey wooden timber palisade castle that was built in the 11th century obviously to guard the river crossing exactly the same way as the roman fort would have been the the medieval castle was only in existence for about 100 years and so i presume it's unusual that isn't it because yes it was never developed into anything other than the uh the original modern bailey timber castle it was never fortified with or extensively with uh with stonework and so presumably it just wasn't significant as a location for a castle anymore the development of the town is probably 12th 13th 14th century and therefore that's when the major river crossing moves away from the ford here onto the present location of the bridge and that's when the town develops around the bridge as they quite often do yeah and then of course this place is abandoned completely and there's nothing here then for a significant number of years possibly even until the english civil war when it was re-fortified to a certain degree we know that because it's it was obviously fought over yeah and then it looks like it was abandoned completely until the 18th century well set late 17th 18th century when the houses when they built the house and then of course it turned it into formal gardens and that brings up the question as to why these skeletons that were found here in the 70s and then we subsequently refound why were these skeletons buried on these bodies buried on the top of this hill are they roman are the anglo-saxon are they norman are they post-roman are they english civil war for example are they people that died joining one of the sieges of tadcaster or are they significantly later and we need to know that the important bridge at tadcaster forms a vital crossing point of the river wharf historically its position has held significant strategic importance this means the town has been no stranger to war over the centuries particularly in the medieval period tim had to consider a number of possibilities to support the idea that the skeleton might have been the result of conflict in the early 14th century the scottish leader william wallace led attacks into england and many were killed during his raids on the york area it's not commonly known that the scots travel this far south and succeeded in creating a lot of damage but they did they moved further south than this and there were conflicts in and around you know this area and it's known that there was conflict when scots invaded in the early 1300s down here but the most significant military event in the tadcaster area for hundreds of years dated to the 15th century more than 150 years after wallace [Music] in 1461 thousands of men fled through the town routing from the battle of towton just a few miles away [Music] one of the reasons we thought there may have been a cemetery here is the extension of the cemetery needed when in 1461 after the battle of town there was a significant route between townton through tadcaster on the way to york which is on the on the same route and what happened is that significant numbers of people were caught because the bridge had been broken by the lancastrians in order to stop the yorkists invading york and so what happened is there's a lot of people who were killed in and around tadcaster at the time we know this from the documentary evidence and we thought well potentially this could be a cemetery associated with the dead people that were caught up in the walls of the roses and of course by dating the skeleton to potentially the mid-1400s it might have been the case that that was what has happened ascertaining why the skeleton was buried here was not going to be simple [Music] it wasn't even clear what sex it was detailed analysis was needed marlin holst was asked to carry out the osteological analysis of the tadcaster skeleton there are certain individuals that really stick out and partly maybe because they have unusual pathology or because they have a particularly well preserved skeleton and but some you really connect with and you feel for them if they suffered or um or you see what circumstances they were buried under and you're trying to understand and the reasoning behind that so some people you really do connect with the bones were strong and solid showing signs of a relatively long life of hard work what's more the bones appeared to be those of a woman this meant the skeleton couldn't be that of a soldier but could the victim still have been in the grave as a result of comfort a clue on the skeleton at first caused him to speculate the woman might have died through being caught up in a battle or its aftermath one of the marks on the skull as simon had found seemed to indicate trauma an injury we initially thought there was some head trauma it looked like a blade wound on parts of the skull and so we got really excited and thinking this is it it is a result of head trauma during conflict or whatever subsequently had the skeleton analyzed and it looked like it was done by a spade and of course these skeletons are just just below the surface so of course obviously with a little bit of overactive digging you could cause some damage to the skeletal material the radiocarbon result finally puts paid to the idea of a conflict-related cause of death the skeleton was from the mid-1300s this put it too late to be as a result of wallace and too early for towton one by one the options were being eliminated so of course that's another thing we can just wipe away and say fair enough you know now we've managed to cancel that so it's like the we know that they're not roman we know they're not anglo-saxon we know that knots from the 15th century to wars of the roses we know they're not civil war soldiers who were fighting in around the settlements here and the castle itself and so we managed to squeeze it down to a very narrow period of time tim was forced to think again what else was going on in the mid 1300s in yorkshire this is where we start getting some interesting results because we radio carbon dated it and it dated quite securely to the early to mid 1300s because the castle has already been abandoned by them if the castle's been abandoned it's obviously waste ground it might have been farmed or cultivated as a private allotment but if something happened in a very short period of time that accumulated large numbers of dead people in a small cemetery and that was unusual rushed burials particularly of more than one body could suggest a cause of death that in some ways was even more terrifying than battle one of the things that immediately strikes you is that the whole of europe was decimated by the black death by the plague between a third and half of population potentially died of europe died a significant number of people died in and around sadcaster and that means that the cemeteries would have been full within a few months or a year or so the cemeteries would have been full because there's just nowhere else to put them there could be potentially hundreds of people dying in a very short period of time in around tadcaster and the surrounding district because remember this is a paris church and so of course it's attracted a lot of people from in and around chatcaster significantly distant from tadcaster itself and so they would have been drawn here to be buried uh after their life had ended the black death ripped across the landscape wiping out entire communities yorkshire was no exception for the people of medieval england who experienced it life was never the same again piers mitchell lectures in biological anthropology at the university of cambridge he studied how what we now know as bubonic plague spread throughout medieval europe there are certain epidemic diseases like bubonic plague that many people would have never experienced until the epidemic swept through and then virtually everyone would have been exposed to it and a proportion of people would have died for example in the black death in 1348 perhaps 50 60 percent of people seem to have died in europe coping with such catastrophic losses must have been traumatic for the survivors who had to rebuild their lives [Music] we have to remember that in medieval europe attitudes to death were somewhat different to what they are now religion was very important and the place of the church was very important so although no one particularly wanted to die there was a much stronger thought that what's important is that you live your life so you go to heaven when you do die so unlike today there was less fear of death and more acceptance that it was going to happen and people were taught by the church that what's important is when you did die you'd lived a good enough life to go to heaven and so there were slightly different attitudes to disease and different attitudes to death we didn't necessarily have to be cured of a disease to have a good life but so long as you prayed and ticked all the boxes from the point of view of of the church then it didn't matter if you died early because if you went to heaven that's what life was all about to the medieval mind the black death outbreak in the 14th century killed large numbers of people very quickly up to now the only known evidence for mass deaths of this kind is from london could the comparatively small number of skeletons at tadcaster also be a result of the plague the problem is we assumed that the individuals from the black death were buried in massive pits well a lot of that wouldn't have been possible in normal church yet they were usually packed with remains so it's likely that a lot of the these plague pits were actually not in constituted ground or were in ground that was later consecrated and i'm sure there have been assemblages found in britain where the assumption has been that they are plagued cemeteries but it hasn't been proven marlin set about finding how to verify whether the woman had died from black death and a recent discovery in bioarchaeology provided the means to do so dna analysis techniques have developed dramatically in recent decades caused by the yesinia pestis bacteria and transmitted to humans by the fleas of infected rodents bubonic plague or black death is a pathogenic killer though yersinia pestis was discovered in 1894 its genome has only recently been decoded this genomic sequence now allows scientists to pinpoint the existence of bubonic plague in the intact dna of ancient skeletons michelle mundy is an expert on analyzing the biomolecular structure of archaeological specimens when we have a skeleton and we can look at it morphologically can we say we can say certain things about it and then if you want to get down to the molecular level and look at dna what we can look at we can look at different genes we can say you know more or less what color eyes someone might have had in the past we can look at skin skin tone we can look at um things like whether they had runny earwax or not these are all genes that we know that we know what they do so that we can we can look for them we can look for the genetic changes that cause these particular features um to arise in your in your body all of these things will tell us something about a person in the past they might not have actually manifested them completely so we might be able to say this person contains has the gene for this but we don't know how much that was actually manifested in their actual life i don't think we'll ever definitely get to that there's a difference between what's in our genetics and what we actually did throughout life so a lot of what we look like and and our personalities is you know as you know half about what's in our genes and what's in our lifestyle how we've been brought up marlon visits michelle to find out more about the skeleton from tadcaster it would be interesting to see whether this skeleton actually is related um in any way or the mass grave is related in any way to the black death what's inside is what we're actually going to be sampling which is the dental pulp which is right in the center of the tooth so what the specialists will do when they actually actually have the tooth they'll probably cut it or longitudinally down the middle and scrape out with a small dental implement the pulp that's inside and use that for the dna although you can get dna out of any tissue that's surviving the best to go for or the best material to go for would be the teeth because the dental enamel is what's protecting the dna inside it's much harder for things to get inside teeth than it is for things to get inside bone and vice versa to get out as well so we want to use a tooth that is as intact as possible has as much of the enamel there which would have protected the dna inside and we want these roots to be um fused we're going to have to take one of these teeth out the jaw and we were going to go for this one here um unlike the other ones it doesn't have quite as much wear there are there is a bit of wear on the top there but hopefully that hasn't actually reached um um the dental pop inside so that's probably going to be the best one for the job so h09 and we're going to go for why pesticides which is the um causative agent of uh the black death the trouble with plague is that it kills you too quickly for your skeleton to react to it so we'll need to use dna because you will be able to look at a skeleton and say we think this person has died of plague whereas you can look at a skeleton and say we think this person might have been suffering from tuberculosis or leprosy and those sorts of ailments we can look at the skeleton for that because they are long-term diseases where your bone often you know they might have had it for a long time and in which case your bone has actually reacted to the disease plague no chance well the dna analysis would be very very interesting in terms of whether we can tell whether this individual did suffer from the plague because as michelle has said this is something that we just cannot do from the osteological analysis of the skeleton [Music] did the woman die as a result of plague as the plagues spread across europe it had a great effect on the structure of society entire cultures had to adapt quickly to enormous losses in their working population the black death swept right across europe from 1348 about 1352 and had major effects not only on people's lives but the social structure of europe at that time it seems that perhaps 50 or 60 percent of people across europe died during the black death firstly it would have profound effects on the genetics of medieval europeans if you think there's something different about the sixty percent that died and the forty percent that didn't so it's quite likely to have significantly affected our gene pool now so that we may be better able to resist certain kinds of infectious disease because those of us that couldn't cope with the black death had our genes removed from society secondly it had significant effects upon the population number a lot of the poor had to rely on the little work that was available they were attached to the land they couldn't move about and live where they wanted to a lot of them were had to live where their hut was and they had to give a lot of their income on work for a particular land over on noble when you have 60 percent of workmen die then you suddenly have this bizarre position where there's a shortage of labor and people can move around because the landowner next door is prepared to pay you to go and work for him and people could move to towns and get work there because all the labourers were dead and so suddenly people weren't tied to the land anymore they weren't semi-slaves to the nobility and we have a complete breakdown and change in the way people saw the ability to advance themselves to move around the country and to change their career path so in many different ways the black death had a major effect on both britain and the rest of europe so that we find life in the 12th and 13th century is very different to the late 14th and 15th century societal changes like this help pinpoint events such as plague in the historical record even though until very recently there was no way to identify archaeological evidence now the dna results are in and tim has exciting news but just before we've done the research somebody finds the dna of the yesinia pestis and so obviously to not to utilize that would have been crazy so we asked them and it tentatively looks as though it's evidence of the plague which is unbelievable and it's very unusual i believe because to find a plague cemetery that's not either a mass grave or somewhere very urban like london for example where they found huge burial pits from huge plague pits but to find what looks like almost a normal cemetery with with evidence of the plague in it is fantastic and so it leads on to other things you know what can we say about this cemetery what can we find out about the play that's not evidence in a mass plague pit for example and so it's really good news for us we've answered the main question it does look like it's a plague cemetery that ties in with the date really nicely it also explains why they're where they are in an old abandoned castle and so in terms of the remit of why we're doing the research we've got a result it's been fantastic the the presence of uzinia pestis in the dna of the skeleton from tatcaster is extremely interesting because we are only just starting to be able to even detect the dna for using your pesticides the genome for using the pestis has only just been found about a year and a half ago so this is very new stuff we can never normally tell the how people died until unless it was a traumatic death for example a skull injury or something like that so it's very rare that we can say what a person's cause of death is and in this case of course we also can't say yes india pestis or the plague was definitely the cause but it's very likely um if if she suffered from from the plague then it's it's likely that that was the cause of death so would this explain the burials at tadcaster in the remains of the castle away from consecrated ground the problem of having to bury sudden large numbers of dead would have given the people of tadcaster a serious problem what's happening is the normal method of dying and this disposal of the dead has been interrupted there are just large numbers of deads the cemetery is expanding to its limits and now we've got evidence it's actually burst out of the cemetery and it's gone into this waste ground which was the old abandoned medieval castle every day one or two people are dying in a very local community so imagine if you people you know and they're literally dying around you one after the other one day after another then another one goes another one goes and it must have induced some sort of terror in you because you don't know when you're going to go or if you're going to go and so the whole atmosphere must have been really charged by this whole uncertainty about are you going to survive are you going to end up on this hill in an abandoned castle up outside a normal cemetery but you would have heard about it in throughout tadcaster throughout the whole of york throughout the whole of england and beyond england it's it was spreading across europe even though it's known that plague affected almost all the country dna analysis like this provides a way of finding conclusive archaeological proof [Music] there's only really one known plague cemetery in britain and that smith field in london where it was always suspected that actually these were plague victims and individuals are buried in large pets so they could have also been another disease but that was proven um very recently that these appear to have had the plague so this is really only the second um individual or the second assemblage from britain where this has been proven so it's very exciting and the excavation only uncovers um a couple of skeletons and only one of those was lifted so we don't really know the extent of the grave or or the the number of skeletons but it's possible that this is a plague pit and there are many skeletons there many questions have been answered about the life and death of a woman buried in a shallow grave with a few other individuals over six and a half centuries ago for simon richardson it's decades since his childhood interest and enthusiasm for archaeology set him on the way to discovering the skull at castle hill [Music] i suppose it's this garden's played a bit of an important part in my life because you know finding what i found here i mean this is just some of the examples of the pottery i was finding in the flower beds i suppose you could say this handful of pottery got me where i am today i'm fortunate enough to work on on battlefields and other medieval sites around britain and europe so i have a lot to be thankful for the woman whose body simon discovered had lain within sight of the church in which he himself was married and in which his children were christened it's a reminder that the archaeology we find in the ground is often all that remains of the trace of a human life such is the fragility of what we leave behind beyond written record or living memory [Music] wow i never expected that crikey i've lived in takata over 40 years and i've never expected to see like this you do think about these people when you dig them up i mean they're only bones or any human remains when we find them but who was she was an important person within the town was your mother um you know she probably worshipped in this church she probably crossed the bridge nearly every day um to go to the other side of the town just drank in some of the old the old taverns and things washed the clothes in the river these things we'll never know i mean all we have are the human remains to go on but it doesn't stop you thinking once upon a time you know she was a living breathing person and she's ended up in this well it's a bit of worse ground we now know she died a horrible death and she died of the plague [Music] if i had knocked on the door all those years ago when i was 11 years old she'd probably still be laid down there in the ground undiscovered forgotten about [Music] you

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 99,099

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, medieval archaeology, medieval archaeology news, medieval archaeology finds, medieval battlefield archaeology, black death documentary, black death pandemic, medieval commoner, medieval peasant life, medieval peasant documentary, bubonic plague, black death documentary bbc, medieval black death, what was life like during the black plague

Id: NvcV9P3Ni7Y

Length: 46min 1sec (2761 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021