Hi my name's Kevin Hicks, welcome to my YouTube
Channel The History Squad. Now today's video is about the Black Death said to be the deadliest
plague in human history, well I've got some interesting stories about this which might
kind of turn some of the history on its head. Now I've always been under the assumption that
the Black Death was in fact the Bubonic plague you know the, the one spread by rats, or more
specifically the fleas that live on the rats. This is what I've been taught and also what is
still being said in popular history to this day, and also I was taught that there were just two
main outbreaks of the plague in England at 1348 and then 1665 which they named The Great Plague.
But modern studies have turned this whole thing on its head. What I've discovered is quite
fascinating, but it's taught me something. You have got to keep an open mind when it comes
to history, it's not always written in stone. So the Black Death, Bubonic plague. Originated in
China, so I understand. It was spread west though by a Mongolian Army. Jani Beg, he's uh, ruler of
a Mongol horde. They are pursuing some Christians who had actually murdered a Muslim soldier, they
trapped them in the town of Caffa, lay siege to it, but the Mongolian army is suffering terrible
deaths from the plague, so they do the honorable thing and catapult the dead in the town hoping
to spread the disease amongst the Christians, who come the month of May 1347, have it on their toes
and escape. They get straight to Constantinople, which is modern Istanbul in Turkey. But
they've taken the plague with them. 90 percent, think about that, 90 percent of the population
of Constantinople will die. Now hang on here, if 90 of the population dies really quickly ,
how can there be enough rats and fleas to spread throughout an entire city so fast and kill 90
percent of the population? That's the first kind of warning to Kev, I'm thinking about it, really?
Now this plague spreads from Constantinople to Sicily just off that southern tip of Italy in
October 1347, it's actually transported by ship, and then very quickly it spreads up the leg
of Italy. By November it has actually reached France. Hang on a second that's weeks isn't it,
and then when you follow where the plague went it's always along the trade routes, men who
are plying their trade and then it continues on it goes all the way up into Norway across to
England. Ironically it ends up in Iceland, which I find quite strange because there are no rats in
Iceland, or at least there wasn't in those days. Modern estimates reckon that the medieval plague
wiped out 50 percent of the population of Europe, that's incredible when you think about it. Also
though, I was always taught that there were just those two outbreaks in England uh 1348 and
1665, and yet what I've now learned is the plague raged for 300 years. In fact in France, it
was never free of the plague for that 300 years, it was always breaking out somewhere. So let's
have a look into the life of a medieval doctor. Ah so I'm dressed as a medieval doctor, quite
successful especially when the plagues in town. I can tell you I have cures for almost anything,
I can sell you cures.....well I'm going to talk about the cures in a little while. I must just let
you know that the church believes that the plague has been sent by God to punish us all for our evil
ways, well I've got to get to work, so I'm going to take this off. I don't want to get any blood,
mucus, vomit you know the kind of stuff on it. So here I am, just ordinary Dr Kev. June 1348 the
plague arrives in England. A ship has docked. In no time at all from Dorset on the south coast near
Weymouth, the town of Weymouth, the plague spreads along the trade routes. Now as I was taught it
was the rats, but rats can't move that fast, this is tradesmen going from place to place.
Bristol, London, Gloucester are the three main areas hit in England. So bad in Gloucester
apparently up to 90 percent of the population died. But the symptoms, grouping into three,
the first little group is a sweating sickness, agony, final stages vomiting blood, delirious,
absolute raging thirst. But then there is another symptom which is the buboes as they called it,
or the swelling of the lymph nodes, under your armpits. Accompanying this could be spots rashes
all over your body. The other symptom the final one is the buboes or the swellings between your
legs. This was extremely painful and once these symptoms appeared the patient would die within
days. Now there is an original quote, I've got lots of them actually, about what the plague
was like, but I've got this book Return of the Black Death the World's Greatest Serial Killer, we
have an eyewitness account in that book. Giovanni Boccaccio but he tells you what it was like
he tells you that yeah, there was the symptom of the vomiting the blood but there's these other
symptoms of the rash, the spots all over the body, some big, some small. Then he talks about the
swelling under the armpit as big as an egg and absolute agony and also in between your legs.
People, once these symptoms showed, within days they were dead. So this plague, absolutely
deadly and agonizing to the individuals. So there you are medieval England 1348,
the plague is afoot and you're a doctor. How'd you deal with it? You imagine
you're a monk at one of the hospitals, all of these hospitals dotted around Europe
and England and there's an outbreak of the plague. How do you deal with it? And it's, it's
quite terrifying really when you when you think about it because people were dying by their
thousands. So the doctors, one of the cures, get yourself the horn of a unicorn. Isn't
that great. First of all you got to catch it, apparently it involves moonlight and virgins.
I have no idea. But if you can catch a unicorn, cut off its horn, crush it up, make it into a
paste, you can spread the paste on the bubo, or you can make a drink. You could also
get fresh human feces, make it into a paste rub that into the bubo. Or if you're wealthy, you
can crush emeralds and make them into a drink and drink them. It's crazy isn't it, but they had no
idea. How about this one, the bursting frog. You have buboes under the armpit, get yourself
a frog, you then open the frog's mouth, prick the bubo, connect the frog to the hole
and the frog will suck out all of the puss. You'll know when he's done his job because
he will burst. Just to let you know no frogs were injured during the making of this film.
The other one is you get yourself a chicken, and you pluck the nether regions of the
said chicken, you then fasten the chicken, stop, under your armpit and the clamminess of the
skin will draw out the poison. They even came up with... oh dear, the chicken is dead...that if you
stood over the vapors coming up from the privy, in other words the cesspit, the toilet, the
evil aromas coming up from the ground would attract the evil inside your body.
The fact is they didn't have a clue, and it will lead to anything up to a half,
fifty percent of the population of Europe dying. But over in Europe things were changing. Ragussa,
which is actually now called Dubrovnik in Croatia. 1348 that town had been devastated by
the plague, but they learned something. They learned that the plague was passed on from
person to person from the sick to the healthy, so they come up with the idea that you can't come
in to Ragussa. You can't come in until you can prove to us that you're not carrying the disease.
So ships will be held out in the harbor. It was eventually uh rounded up to 40 days, quarantino.
It's where the English word quarantine comes from, and it worked. Quarantine worked, and when you
go into slightly Northern Italy there is a such a sad case of where people broke the quarantine
rules and it was a tradesman, a merchant sorry, who decided to go from his town to Bologna because
his business was more important than mankind, and he took the disease. People didn't realize
that although they didn't show the symptoms, they were contagious they, they were spreading
the disease if that makes sense and he devastated Bologna. And this is something that kind of
makes me question the way I've been taught about the Bubonic plague, the Black Death.
For all these years I've been told yeah it was you're sending Yersinia Pestis, it was
spread by this flea on these rats and yet the evidence is actually building to show that
no, no. Even in the day they knew that if you had an infected person and they coughed on
you it was quite possibly a death sentence. But there were exceptions. So how come then after
all these years we've been stuck with this theory that the plague was spread by rats? Well it all
boils down to a microbiologist Alexandre Yersin, born in Switzerland, but he was in Hong Kong
1894, where there was a terrible plague and he was trying to get to the bottom what was this
plague. He even had to bribe officials there in Hong Kong so he could have access to bodies so
he could look inside them who had died from this mysterious illness, and what he discovered was
the Bubonic plague, which was spread by rats or to be precise the rats carried a flea on the back
and when the rat died the host the flea jumped to the next rat and eventually it may infect a human
being. This flea was called Yersinia Pestis and is the rogue of this Bubonic plague. The symptoms,
swelling under the armpits, under the groin, very painful, very similar to the plague way back
in history in Europe, but different because as we know from eyewitness accounts from the day in the
medieval times they already knew that the plague was spread from a sick person to a healthy
person, by one person coughing at another. So because the symptoms of the Bubonic plague are
very similar to those of the Black Death people, since Yersin's discovery that the Bubonic plague
was spread by the rats and the fleas, they have taken the Black Death to be the Bubonic plague,
and it's interesting because there is a bit of a knock-on effect here. Towards the end of the Tudor
period, the Renaissance, into the 17th century you have the appearance of the plague doctor. Now the
plague mask, it's quite famous, but the fact is they were quite clever because they enclosed
the face. There was glass and then the beak, the beak was filled with dried flowers, anything
that has an aroma. Camphor, lavender, peppermint, ambergris, clove. This was to mask the smells
because the doctors believed that the plague was miasmic, it was the miasma, the bad air, the
evil aroma yeah? So doctors were beginning to understand that they needed to protect themselves
from the plague, but also they had a waxed outfit, a full-length coat that went all the
way to the ground, they also wore a hood and then a hat on top completely enclosing the body.
They wore gloves. To move the patient's clothing, the doctors used a stick, a cane, just to move
clothes to one side. They didn't touch a diseased patient. The doctor's clothing protected him
from blood, mucus and vomit that may have been sprayed by a patient. But you imagine you've
got the plague, your armpits are killing you, you're delirious and when you open your
eyes you're looking straight into the face of the crow doctor. It must have been
terrifying. So there were other measures that were brought in place, towards the end
of the 16th, beginning of the 17th century, where if you were one person in a house and you
had the plague you and your family were shut up in the house. Food and supplies will be left on
the doorstep and the house will be marked on the front door with a red cross, it's a plague house.
Then in other communities they would actually have pest houses on the outside of the village so that
you can be taken from your community and put into the pest house to see if you survived.
So they were learning this quarantine business. So you imagine living in the center
of London, the city of London 1665. The plague, the Black Death is at its height, thousands
upon thousands of people are dying every day, how do you deal with the bodies?
Great plague pits had to be dug, cemeteries very quickly became full, so these
grave pits were enormous. 20 feet deep, but in some places they can only go down 16 feet because
of the water table, water coming up. There had to be six feet of soil above the dead, otherwise the
dogs would actually dig down and steal the bodies and devour them. There's the old thing of the,
the plague cart coming round 'bring out your dead' well the people who did that, bring out
your dead, were the poorest of the poor, sometimes the meanest of the mean. There are talks
of how they robbed and lots of that kind of thing, but there are a couple of stories about the body
collectors. Two carts. The first cart is trundling towards the grave pit so the gravediggers are all
there and yet the cart trundled past and when they looked up, the guy sat in the driving seat with
the reins in his hand was actually dead and the horses panic and they gallop off and bodies are
being flung this way and that. And then another one, when the plague wagon is coming towards the
pit, the gravediggers are there waiting for them and the wagon just plunges straight into the grave
pit. You couldn't make this up for a horror film, you don't need the zombies or anything, this
actually happened. The wagon is tipped upside down, they believe that the wagon driver
was killed or died because they found his whip amongst the dead, but now they've got
to get the horses that are upside down in the plague pit out. They've got to bring the
wagon out. This great plague of London 1665, we know so much about it and the reason being is
you have Samuel Pepys who wrote Samuel Pepys diary and he goes right the way through that terrible
plague and then to 1666. It's an incredible read, I've got my own copy. Have a look it is a real
eye-opener, there are a few saucy bits in there, so do be prepared. But slightly lesser known than
Samuel Pepys is a comment by Daniel Defoe the famous author now Daniel Defoe he actually
gives you a first-hand account about how the plague was spread and there were no mention
of fleas or rats here. Have a listen..."Because of its infectious nature, the disease
may be spread by apparently healthy people who harbor the disease but
have not yet exhibited symptoms. Such a person was in fact a poisoner,
a walking destroyer, perhaps for a week or a fortnight before his death." So here is
somebody at the time acknowledging there was an incubation period where the person appeared
to be healthy but they were infectious and he talks about how they would ruin the life of those
people around him even to the point of breathing death upon them. "Even perhaps his tender
kissing and embracings of his own family". So he's identified there, it's a kiss of death,
it is spread human to human. So this book I've been reading, the Return of the Black Death, it's
really challenged my knowledge about this whole subject, what I've been taught, what I understood.
But there's a modern, a couple of modern studies, using the parish registers of the late Tudor
period of two towns. Well, one town and one village. The first one is Penrith, way up in the
north of England, in Cumbria. I've been there many times, a lovely place, and what they've been able
to do is use these new records because it became law in Tudor England that you had to register
births, deaths, marriages all of that kind of stuff and those Parish registers still exist. So
the first investigation, modern day investigation, on the plague Penrith, the Cumbrian town right
up the north of England, isolated in those days, and the parish records revealed a death 25th of
September 1597 of stranger, Andrew Hogson. And then it tells you how he'd arrived on the 16th of
August 1597, he lodged with the Railton family and there were no deaths for 21 days until he died.
But what they didn't know is the incubation period of the plague was anything up to 30 days, so
Hogson has in fact infected three members of the Railton family. They in turn infect more members
of their own family and then it widens, teenagers go to visit cousins and it records how all the way
down the line through Penrith, for 15 months, you could track all of the infections back to a single
stranger. Penrith was devastated by the plague. So the second of our studies takes us to Eyam
in Derbyshire, tiny little village in the Peak District I understand. 1665 you'll never guess, a
stranger arrives at the village. George Vickers, an itinerant tailor. He lodges with Mary Hadfield
in the village and he goes about his business visiting other neighbors drumming up custom for
his business but then the one day he doesn't come down for breakfast. Mary goes upstairs and
George is in absolute agony, delirious, terrible um thirst, pain. So she calls the local Rector
there William Mompesson and he turns up and knows straight away this is the plague. Now there is a
dark silence hangs over the village, there's the question, has he infected anybody else with the
plague? After the funeral of George Vickers the Rector goes into action, he really cares about his
people, he's very conscientious, so he enforces a cordon sanitaire, a cordon around the village, a
sanitary cordon. That means that nobody can come in, nobody can leave. Now just before all of this
went on William evacuates his wife and children but before the cordon is put in place his wife
comes back, she wants to stand by his side. She will help William with the sick, with the
dying and with the dead. She will in fact die in the arms of the Rector, and to this very day her
grave is still visited in that Village of Eyam. This cordon, this cordon sanitaire what a bold
move, what a brave move. Nobody can come in the village, nobody can leave, he's stopping the
spread of the disease. Now the village will quickly run short of supplies so a nearby village
Stoney Middleton will bring supplies to Eyam, but they will not have contact. Cucklett Delph, like a
natural amphitheater, just outside of the village of Eyam and there was a plague stone on the one
side where you actually left supplies, then left the area. People from the plague area came, took
the supplies. These plague stones, apparently you can still find them throughout England. When
you read the parish registers about Eyam, you can see the terrible agony that that village went
through. Entire families wiped out, but there's one story within so many tragic stories that of
Emmett Sidall. She had survived the first wave of the plague in Eyam, but she was betrothed, she was
in love with Roland Torre, but he lived at Stoney Middleton, he was outside the cordon so they
couldn't meet. So instead they met at the Delph, that amphitheater. He will be on one side by the
plague stone, she will be on the other and they would call to each other and have a conversation,
waving and so on and so forth, and this went on for weeks. And then one night she didn't turn up,
and there was nobody to come to the Delph to tell him what had happened and he had to wait for weeks
until eventually the plague abated, the cordon was lifted and he raced to his sweethearts cottage,
but it was empty, she had died many weeks before. It's interesting to reflect that not everybody
died from the plague, it would appear some were immune. Look at Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe,
Mompesson the Rector of Eyam, they actually survived, but if you go back to 1349 medieval
Norway there's a story of someone who survived. Jostadel was a little town that had been founded
by refugees from the plague, wealthy people had run for their lives and they founded this town but
in fact the plague was with them and wiped them out. The entire family of a little girl plus all
of their friends, everybody in that little town died. The survivor, a lone girl, we don't know
her name, went wild. She lived in the woods, she was feral and people could see her from time
to time. Eventually she was brought back in to the human fold, into society and she married, grew up
quite successful because she inherited all of the land, the entire town, all of the possessions of
the people who died. In fact for about 300 years her descendants, her family were amongst
the richest landowners of all of Norway. So to sum up then this Black Death, this 300 years
of plague, if it wasn't caused by the Yesenia Pestis the little flea that lived on the back of
the rat that came from China, then what caused it? Now from what I understand scientists are working
very hard to try and find out exactly what was the Black Death. Bacteria? Virus? Why don't you
let me know your thoughts in the comments. I hope you enjoyed our little film and
found it interesting. If you did like, share and subscribe and don't forget to turn on
the all notification buttons because apparently it does work sometimes. But before I go
a quick shout out to some of my Patreon members Christopher Moore, John Myers and James
Turley, hey guys thanks a bunch. Bye for now.
