Original subtitles

In 1348, the Black Death struck the British Isles

and spread like wildfire.

It's believed to be the most deadly pandemic in history.

Before the Black Death, the population of mainland Britain

was around six million.

Two years later, only an estimated three million were left alive.

Why did this disease claim so many,

and how did the awful death toll change Britain?

In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic

and brutal chapters in British history.

It wasn't just one generation.

It was three generations losing their lives.

Bam, bam, bam.

These stories are part of our national mythology,

harbouring mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.

It's chilling to think that this could actually be evidence

in a murder investigation.

But with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock

their secrets, using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

It's a horrible psychosexual form of torture.

Absolutely.

I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses,

re-examine old evidence, and follow new clues

to get closer to the truth.

It is one of the great British mysteries.

It's one of those moments, I'm afraid, for a historian,

that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

Bubonic plague...

..the pestilence, the great mortality.

There's lots of different names for the Black Death,

infamous for the horrible boils or buboes

that break out on people's skin.

It struck Britain many times, famously in London in 1665.

But I'm interested in the first and the worst outbreak in 1348,

when something like half of the population got wiped out.

I want to investigate how the Black Death transformed society.

What happened to it during and after this terrible medieval pandemic?

But first I want to understand what the Black Death was,

and why the outbreak in 1348 was so deadly.

After all this time, science is still uncovering new evidence.

Stored in this underground vault in London are 600 skeletons.

Each box contains the bones of someone buried in a mass grave

at the height of the plague, outside the old city walls.

This plague pit was unearthed in the 1980s during building work

and excavated by archaeologists.

Strangely beautiful thing!

It is. His teeth, look at his teeth!

I know, they're fantastic, aren't they?

Osteologist, Jelena Bekvalac, is curator of this collection.

These are definitely Black Death victims.

But for centuries, science was uncertain

what caused the disease.

Then, in 2011, DNA taken from the teeth of these skeletons

confirmed what had actually killed them.

This has been a great mystery, hasn't it, for 700 years at least?

Yeah. We had these individuals, and then scientists

used the DNA analysis, recreating and reconstructing

an ancient genome.

And by doing that, they were able to identify

that the actual causative agent was a bacteria

and it was Yersinia pestis.

What did you say? Yersinia pestis.

Yersinia pestis. Yes.

And why was this particular bacterium quite so dangerous?

This one was particularly virulent to us because we, as a population

at that time, had never been exposed to that bacteria.

So there was no immunity within us.

And therefore, when you're exposed to something that's new,

it really then impacts on to the population.

And subsequently, after that episode of the Black Death that we know

killed so many people, there were other outbreaks,

but it didn't have that same impact.

Because of herd immunity?

Because of herd immunity, yes.

So you're building up that lovely sort of immunity to it.

We all know what herd immunity is now! Yeah, yes.

So just at the moment he was going into the plague pit to be buried,

I imagine that he would have had big swelling buboes on him,

is that right?

Yes, that would be where you get the swellings in the armpits

and the groins.

What is that exactly, these swellings?

What, is there something inside them?

Well, there'd be nasty dead cells and pus and poison.

So very uncomfortable, be very sore.

Probably have horrible headaches, feel very sort of fatigued.

You might feel sick, sweats.

You'd feel really very, very unwell and under the weather.

And where did this particular bacterium come from?

Well, they believe that it probably 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.

So it probably started from there.

Emerging global trade routes in the 14th century exposed Britain

to a deadly new disease.

It had raged through Asia and Europe, wiping out millions

before arriving on these shores.

Catch it and you could be dead in days, even hours.

So how did this bacterium spread so aggressively

and kill so many people?

There were some images of life in London that got burnt

into my mind at an early age,

and this is one of them.

It's a scene from the kiddie version of the story

of Dick Whittington and his Cat.

Dick Whittington, being a lad who came to London to seek

his fortune, but who had to sleep in a horrible attic

infested with rats.

Here they all are, running over his bed,

climbing out of the window.

And 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.

But I agree this isn't exactly solid scientific or historical evidence.

I'm going to have to do better than the Ladybird version.

What can the latest science tell me about how this disease

might have spread?

A study from 2018 argues that the Black Death was also spread

by human fleas and lice, infecting people

as they bit into their flesh.

One of the researchers was epidemiologist Dr Fabienne Krauer.

She's in Switzerland, so this will be an online consultation.

So Fabienne is in my waiting room.

Let me admit her.

There she is, Fabienne!

So there's these human fleas that can take the plague

from one human being to another human being?

Yes, infestation of lice and fleas was very common in 14th century.

Would that be through people's bedding or their clothes,

or how can you see that working?

Yeah, so body lice and human fleas,

they typically live in clothes,

in the seams or in the foldings of clothes.

So we know that in the 14th century, the handing down of clothes,

that was a real thing.

And 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 themselves infected.

This is so heartbreaking because people wouldn't

have known, would they?

They wouldn't have known that this is how they were actually

killing their friends and relatives.

No, people had no idea.

But there are also other forms of plague, such as pneumonic plague,

which is transmitted directly between people,

through coughing, through infectious droplets...

Sorry, sorry, sorry, Fabienne, just pause a second.

This is all so new to me, you're taking me into new ground here.

Did you call it the pneumonic version of the disease,

like pneumonia?

Yes, exactly.

So pneumonia happens when someone who has a plague infection,

when these people cough, they expel infectious droplets.

And these can be inhaled by other people which cause

primary pneumonic plague in these people.

And that's a very fatal and rapidly progressing disease.

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?

Yes, it requires a rather close contact.

So it's usually people within the same households that are infected,

or people who care for someone who is sick.

That's a horrible idea, isn't it?

Someone who's taking care of somebody could be infecting

themselves through their compassion.

Yeah, that's indeed horrible.

And if someone had pneumonic plague,

then their fate was basically sealed.

So they were going to die, for sure.

And the fatality for pneumonic plague was about 100%.

100%?

Yeah.

So much new information here.

I hadn't realised that there were these different

variants within plague.

There's the bubonic plague where you get the swellings

in the armpits, but also the pneumonic plague,

which is lung to lung.

And Fabienne's talking about so many different vectors of transmission.

We've got the rats and the fleas, but also...

..body lice and the second-hand clothing,

and just being together in a small space.

No-one was immune to this disease,

rich or poor, young or old.

The Black Death ripped through all levels of medieval society.

Now, what I do know about medieval society is that at the top of it,

we have the king.

And then, below him we have his knights.

Here they are.

These gentlemen give him their loyalty,

he gives them their land.

But the vast majority,

90% of the population,

are, in fact, made up of all these guys - the peasants.

And most of them aren't free.

They'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 this social structure is reinforced

by the church.

Each Sunday, the priest preaches to his parishioners

that this is the way the world is.

This is God's grand design.

How did the Black Death transform this rigidly structured society?

I want to investigate the world of the vast majority

of its victims - the rural peasants.

But contemporary descriptions of how they lived can be misleading.

According to these images, it rather looks lovely.

Here's a happy agricultural worker enjoying the spring air,

sowing his seeds in the ground,

surrounded by birds and leaves.

And here are some farmers bringing in a wonderful crop of corn!

Looks blissful.

But these images are from the Luttrell Psalter.

It's a really fantastic illuminated manuscript,

commissioned by Luttrell himself, a landowner.

He wanted to make living on the land look like

it was a lovely thing to do.

I'm not sure how reliable these images are

as a guide to everyday life.

First hand accounts of 14th century peasant life don't exist.

Most people were illiterate.

There are no gritty life stories to consult.

But they did pay taxes and rent to their noble overlords.

To understand how the majority lived 700 years ago,

you follow the money.

In 14th-century England, rural peasants were summoned

before a court of the manor on which they lived and worked

to pay rent and tax.

These transactions were recorded in court rolls

and they covered every aspect of peasant life.

Fines were paid for disobedience of any kind,

like leaving the manor without permission.

Tax was paid on crops grown on the parcel of land

you leased from the lord.

When you died, your family paid a death tax

to inherit the lease on that parcel of land.

Stored in a temperature-controlled vault in Suffolk Archives

are some of Europe's rarest medieval manuscripts.

They're the court rolls of a small Suffolk village

called Walsham le Willows.

I do know my way to the Suffolk Archives because I've been there

before but the stuff I normally look at is much later than this.

These court rolls cover the period before, during and after

the Black Death struck England in 1348.

What can they tell me about the peasantry and the impact

of the pandemic on their lives?

Oh, wow! Look, they're all out on the table for me already.

Oh!

And aren't they fantastic?

So we're looking at lots and lots of very neat Latin here.

It's so neat, it's got a sort of Excel spreadsheet quality to it.

But I know that buried underneath that,

are real human beings,

even if they're treated here as...

..units of taxation, almost.

Now I know that this set of documents is so important

because it's so comprehensive, it goes on

for years and years and years in the same village,

and you don't normally get that...

..that sort of longitudinal view into the life of a community

because one bit might survive, another bit, not.

So this is just remarkable, the completeness of this record

for 14th-century Walsham.

The rolls are written in medieval Latin.

Fortunately for me, there's an English translation.

Hmm, I did study medieval Latin,

but a long time ago

and not very seriously.

So I'm having to rely on my translation here.

The population of Walsham prior to the Black Death was around 1,200.

Plague strikes the village in June 1349.

The court session for that month shows a huge spike

in death tax being paid.

And it was a very busy court session

because basically,

103 people have all died.

So that's in the last three weeks in this particular sitting

of the court, they had to deal with the business of 103 deaths.

It's extraordinary.

And you can see that the clerk has run out of room.

He's gone down the first piece.

He's had to attach another one to keep going.

And...

..what's kind of chilling is that he doesn't care

that these people have died, what 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, and that tax is called a heriot.

And in some cases, the heriot is...

..a horse.

And in other cases, it's a ewe.

So basically, when your father dies, you have to give the landlord

one of your animals.

But these 103 deaths listed in this court session

are just the heads of families named as land lease holders,

younger men, women and children.

A good 80% of the community aren't recorded.

They're not economically relevant to the records.

Factor them in, and the deaths must number close to 600.

So that's half of the village dying of plague, matching estimates

for the whole country.

These roll are a micro study for all of Britain

during the pandemic.

And here's a particularly interesting family

who are marked out with a cross for some reason.

I can make out their name is Cranmer.

There's William Cranmer,

who's the patriarch of the family.

He's the grandad.

And he held a messuage...

..that means a piece of property, possibly with a house on it.

And it says he also held a tenement and...

..he's died and he has to pay a heriot, the death tax.

Then his son and heir, a second generation...

..he dies, and then there's a third generation who die.

His son Robert dies, and the heriot has to be paid.

But this time they haven't got any horses left, they have to pay a cow.

It's a less good animal, but that's because the lord's

already got the two horses.

But this particular family, the Cranmers, they stand out here...

..because of the awfulness of what happened to them.

It wasn't just one generation or two generations.

It was three generations losing their lives, bam, bam, bam.

All within the same few weeks, in the same...

..in the same village.

The Cranmer clan seem like a typical peasant family.

I want to investigate their life experiences to understand

how Britain was changed by the plague.

Armed with my copy of the court rolls,

next stop for me is Walsham le Willows.

20 miles inland from the Suffolk coast, the present day village

of Walsham still clusters around the local church, St Mary's,

just as it did 700 years ago.

So far, I've looked at Walsham during the time plague struck

the village, but now I'm going to wind the clock back to the years

just before the Black Death.

What was pre-pandemic life like for the Cranmers?

And is there any surviving trace of them left today?

I need some local knowledge.

Oh, hello, Frances. It's Lucy here. I am in Walsham.

Left and look for the school.

I'm off to see a lady called Frances Jenner.

She's the chairperson of the local history society.

And she's one of those people who says,

"Oh, I'm only an amateur historian."

But actually, I suspect that she knows everything

that there is to know.

Like me, Frances is fascinated by the court rolls of Walsham,

and she's been studying them for years.

It was pretty agricultural in the 14th century.

Is it still quite agricultural around here?

It is, very much so, still a very rural community.

So where are you bringing me, Frances?

I'm bringing you to Cranmer farm.

Oh, my goodness. Yes.

Cranmer farm, still got their name on it.

It does, yes.

700 years later! It does, yes.

Though it's been rebuilt since?

It has. It's been rebuilt later.

But they would have had a dwelling here and they farmed

the lands around here.

Do you think they farmed in this very field, then?

We're totally in their neck of the woods?

It's quite possible that they did, we are actually walking on

where they farmed and lived. Excellent.

And having spent a lot of time combing through the court rolls,

have you developed in your mind,

the character of this William Cranmer, the eldest one,

the grandad of the family?

I have, because actually, if you look at him, he actually

has more entries than anybody else.

And there are lots of instances of him being fined for various

breaches of grazing too many sheep on the verges

and all sorts of things.

And I just get the impression that he was a bit of a one, really.

Oh, really? Yeah, I do. A sharp operator?

I think so. Yes, definitely.

That's what we would call him today. Yes.

And how hard or difficult do you think the lives

of the Cranmers were, living here?

Prior to the Black Death, there'd been seven years of famine

due to the unseasonably odd weather conditions -

excessive rains, storms.

And we have to also remember that in those days,

the wheat wasn't the wheat that we know today,

it was really tall.

So storms would basically flatten it,

and then it would just rot in the fields.

So that would mean hardship.

That would mean no food, no, no crops to sell.

They would still have to pay the taxes to the lord of the manor.

So they were being squeezed basically from both sides.

They weren't actually making any money, but they still

had to pay their taxes.

So life would have been hard, they would have been hungry,

they would have been poor.

Life, really, would have been pretty miserable.

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 neighbour

when THEY broke the rules.

William might have a few acres of land, but there's three

generations - his son, his grandson and their extended families -

all living on it.

Perhaps there's just too many of them for the land to support.

The Walsham court rolls list numerous villagers

in the same situation.

While they struggle, they're also duty-bound to work the lord's

personal farmlands, as well as their own.

It's the same across swathes of Britain.

But as I work through the court rolls,

I come across another strain on the Cranmer clan's

hard-pressed resources.

You don't often get women mentioned in these court rolls

because it's mainly about the tenants.

But if you travel back in time...

..we seem to have a granddaughter...

..of wily William Cranmer, the grandfather of the family.

Her name's Olivia.

And the reason that she comes up in the court records

is because of a scandal.

She's had to pay a child white, which is a special fine,

of two shillings and eight pence.

And she's had to pay this because she gave birth outside wedlock.

She's had an illegitimate child.

Having a child out of wedlock in medieval society was condemned

by the church, but it wasn't uncommon.

The problem was more practical.

It was another mouth to feed.

Who would provide?

In Olivia's case, it was swiftly solved.

Shortly after she's fined, the court rolls record Olivia marrying

a Robert Hayes, a peasant with his own land-holdings.

Was Robert the father?

Was this a forced marriage?

The rolls make no mention.

Now that I've learnt more about the Cranmers, I'm intrigued to know

how they, and so many like them,

reacted as plague approached.

In the summer of 1348, plague had spread across the English Channel

aboard trading ships.

Contemporary accounts agree that the first outbreaks in Britain

were in Weymouth and Bristol.

The disease caught fire and spread from the coast into the countryside.

Now Walsham might feel like it's in the middle of nowhere,

but it isn't, and it wasn't in the 14th century either.

It was connected, as the world was, through global shipping routes.

Walsham is 100 miles away from London, but crucially,

it's only 26 miles, or a day's walk,

from the international port of Ipswich.

Ipswich was just a day's sail from France.

News of the Black Death's horrors found their way across the Channel.

Most accounts coming from Europe were utterly apocalyptic.

And this sounds frankly implausible. He describes here,

"a rain of frogs, snakes, lizards and scorpions,

"thunderbolts and lightning" - this sounds like crazy pub talk.

But then, much more believably, he talks about the plague

travelling via Genoese ships to Marseilles.

And then to Avignon, where, oh, golly, where half

the people have died.

So once it's got to France, that's roughly only 24 hours'

journey away from this village, from this pub.

You can imagine people here laughing, maybe,

speculating, maybe,

really frightening themselves as they talked about it

on a Friday night.

Accounts like this reached Britain throughout 1348,

well before the Black Death struck Walsham.

But is there evidence in the court rolls that even rumours

about plague changed people's behaviour?

Here's a meeting of the court from the autumn

before the Black Death, and here we've got...

..how many men? I think it's...

Yes, it's 11 men in total who are in trouble

because they've not turned up to work.

They get fined for not doing their duties,

including William Cranmer, actually.

What might they have been doing instead?

Well, this might be my imagination, but just up here, we've got some

other men who were fined, who were punished for brewing

and selling ale in breach of the assize.

I am tempted to think that these 11 men thought,

right, the plague is coming, we're with jolly well not

going to go to work, we're going to go to the pub instead.

Let's make merry, because tomorrow...

..we die.

It might have seemed to many that doomsday was approaching.

How did those in power try to prepare the population

for what was coming?

What was their message to the people?

Belief in God and his will was central to medieval life.

Everyone attended church to be guided in all things,

both on Earth and spiritually, by their local priest.

With rumours of bodies piling up in the streets

in the West Country, an official Black Death briefing

was made from church pulpits in the autumn of 1348.

The king, Edward III, tells the Archbishop of Canterbury

to write a letter with instructions for the people.

It's to be read out from the pulpit across the country.

And historians usually called this letter after its first word,

which is, "Terribilis..."

..terrible.

This was a mass communication, filtered down from king...

..to bishop, to priest, to peasant.

"Terrible is God towards the sons of men.

"He allows plagues to arise,

"to torment men and drive out their sins.

"It is now to be feared that this kingdom is to be oppressed

"by the pestilence and wretched mortalities which have flared

"up in other regions."

The message is, it's real, it's here,

it's coming to get us, and it's coming because you've all sinned.

This announcement affected everyone.

Everyone sinned!

Breaking any of the Ten Commandments was a sin.

But the medieval church was particularly obsessed

with fornication.

Olivia Cranmer was fined and would have served penance

for having a child out of wedlock.

There were tens of thousands like her across the country.

They were an easy target.

Some clergy were quick to blame plague on immoral women

and their choice of dress.

OK, here we've got some very naughty, sexy, 14th-century ladies

who have got slashes in their dresses, revealing

their figures and what they've got on underneath.

And this lady here, her robe has got great big holes,

enormous armholes in it, so you can see her shape through it.

And the name of these holes is brilliant -

they were known as windows into hell!

The church maintains that only prayer could quell God's wrath

and stop the pestilence.

But no amount of praying could halt the progress

of this terrible disease.

By November 1348, the Black Death had spread eastward.

Accounts claim that in Bristol, only one in ten survived.

Plague had struck London and broken out in York.

Everywhere, communities were decimated.

Church cemeteries overflowed.

Across the country, plague pits were dug.

This is just the most heartbreaking image.

It's one of the very earliest depictions, it's from 1349,

of a plague pit, here are bodies being buried.

Look at the grief on the face of this man here, with the spade.

And here are crowds of new coffins being brought.

And this would have been the scene all over Britain,

all over Europe, where the plague spread.

And to these poor people, it must have felt like the end of the world.

Getting a decent burial was a hugely important medieval ritual.

So plague pits were a shocking and sudden change in this society.

With people surrounded by so much death,

surely their spiritual beliefs were shaken?

How did the church cope during the crisis?

Medieval historian Dr Claire Kennan specialises in the impact

of the Black Death on faith and the church in Britain.

So, Claire, explain this to me. People are suffering,

they're praying, the prayer isn't working,

but they still go on doing it. Why is that?

So in the 14th century, everyone's very concerned

with the health of their souls.

And the belief is that when you die, you will inevitably spend some time

in purgatory, which really isn't a very nice place.

So what people want to do is really lessen the amount of time

they're going to spend there, and they do that through prayer,

through acts of repentance, and through giving money to the church.

So people are saying prayers, not necessarily to save their life,

but to have a better death?

Exactly.

When the Black Death happens, then, how's the church

going to respond, what are they going to do?

Obviously, you've got a clergy who are effectively

at the front line of this disease.

They are working with people who are dying from a very,

very transmissible illness.

They're getting in very close contact.

They're leaning in to listen to that last whispered confession.

And so we do see a huge number of clergy dying,

approximately 50%, generally.

But in some places this is much higher.

And of course, this leads to extreme shortages.

So there's a big problem here for the church.

How are they going to solve it?

The church brings in some really interesting emergency measures.

What I've got here is actually a papal license, which is granted

to the Archbishop of York so that he can recruit more priests.

And it says, "Because of the mortality from plague,

"which overshadows your province at this time,

"not enough priests can be found for the cure and rule of souls,

"or to administer the sacraments."

And this is actually a list of novices who are currently

being pushed through the system, if you will. Oh!

So it's sort of like sending through the medical students

to do the work of doctors?

Exactly, and what happens is that we actually get quite a lot

of complaints about these new priests.

One chronicler even says quite scathingly that they're no

better than laymen.

But it's important to remember that this isn't everyone's experience.

And actually what we see during and after the Black Death

is people turning to the church, possibly more than before.

So 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 not in purgatory for too long.

So the pandemic didn't shatter religious faith,

it strengthened it.

Pilgrimage, especially, was an act of devotion,

involving a long journey on foot.

It was one of the few things a peasant was permitted

to leave their manor for.

And during the Black Death, thousands trekked to sacred

sites across Britain.

Perhaps the most sacred of all was the awe-inspiring

Canterbury Cathedral.

It's utterly overwhelming in here.

It's a...

..it's a splendid visual feast,

even for a 21st-century person!

Imagine what it would have been like coming here 700 years ago,

maybe from a rural village,

where your church was much smaller than this.

Must have blown your mind.

Canterbury offered more than just salvation of the soul.

It promised a cure for the plague.

Pilgrims coming here in 1348 would have seen this stained glass window.

The peasant classes might have been illiterate, but they could read

the story in this window's pictures.

It tells of a boy struck down by disease.

He dies.

But when he drinks holy water from Canterbury,

he's miraculously revived.

The water itself is holy because it comes from Canterbury,

but it's also supposed to contain diluted drops of the blood

of St Thomas, so that's what's done the business.

It's like a fantastic advertisement, really.

"Our holy water will bring your dead son back to life."

A booming trade grew around pilgrimages during the Black Death.

Peasants would have been able to buy a flask of holy water to take home.

They were sold for a few pence in vast quantities

in the cathedral grounds.

A collection of these flasks, or ampoules, as they're called,

is housed in the local museum.

This is the most fabulous little thing.

It's so collectable because there's the tiny little saint there.

It's like a little toy, but it also has a totally serious purpose.

You would put your holy water inside your tiny flask.

You'd stopper it up and you'd take it home and you would treasure it.

And it's easy to pour scorn on this and say,

"Oh, they were flogging tat to tourists",

or, "Oh, how did they think that would keep them safe?"

But to a 14th-century person,

desperately frightened about what was going to happen,

this was a way of making yourself feel better,

and that's not to be underestimated.

But with thousands travelling across the country to places

like Canterbury, to me there's a clear risk

with so many people mixing at a time of plague.

I'm heading to see a surviving 14th-century shelter

used for overnight stays by Canterbury pilgrims.

Hello. Hello. Welcome to Eastbridge.

Thank you. Come in.

Whoa! What a splendid place.

Welcome to the Undercroft.

The Undercroft? Yeah.

Mm, it smells a little damp!

It's very damp, yeah.

And I can imagine with pilgrims staying here,

it would have been really grim.

It would not have been a nice stay, but it would have been safe.

You were off the high street.

You didn't need to worry about being robbed,

but this wouldn't have been a pleasant stay at all.

Would you have packed a lot of people into your...

Yeah, there probably would have been 30, 40 people

down here, all sharing hay beds.

And it depends on who'd stayed there before,

the state of the hay that you slept on.

So you could have picked up lots of creepy crawlies and bugs.

The pilgrims sleeping in here in the straw 700 years ago,

I'm sure they were feeling good about themselves.

They'd finished their pilgrimage.

They'd protected themselves against sickness.

But from my perspective, there's a terrible,

horrible irony here, they're all crammed in together.

People were coughing, they were sleeping in hay and straw

that was days old, it had had other people sleeping in it.

Imagine the fleas, and the body lice, and the rats.

And then, you know, they were all planning to go back

to their villages the next day, villages like Walsham.

Sounds like a super-spreader event.

By New Year 1349,

plague had infected so many in London

that the English Parliament was prorogued -

it was shut down.

For a moment, no-one, it seems, had oversight of the country

as the Black Death ripped through England.

By Spring, plague had reached Wales.

Leicester and Lincoln had been struck.

Estimated casualties in Norwich were horrendous.

Every day, it was getting closer to Walsham.

The court rolls suggest plague hit Walsham in April 1349.

Among the first to die is William Cranmer the elder,

Olivia's grandfather.

Swiftly followed by Olivia's father, and her brother.

Three generations of Cranmers, dead in a matter of weeks.

For two months, the Black Death tore through Walsham.

Family after family lost loved ones.

At some point, Olivia's husband Robert also succumbs.

But 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,

her name simply isn't mentioned.

It was a new bacterium.

There was no herd immunity.

People didn't really understand how it spread.

But in any case, there was no escape.

If you were a peasant, you could not leave your community

without the permission of your lord.

You literally had to stay there, working the land,

paying your tax, waiting to see if you'd live or die.

By Autumn 1349,

the Black Death was raging in Ireland and Northumbria.

Then the Scots invaded England, believing that God had sent

the pestilence to punish their English foes.

Unfortunately, they may have taken plague back to Scotland with them,

where the disease flared up soon after.

In 1350, the Black Death finally died out in the British Isles.

In two years, the pandemic had claimed the lives

of up to half the population.

But eyewitness accounts of what life was like in the immediate aftermath

of plague, are scant.

Those that survive are mainly written by clerics.

And these rare fragments hint at a serious breakdown in society.

Now, this is one of the best of them.

It's by a monk from Rochester.

His name is William Deane, and he's writing in 1350.

So only just after the Black Death, he's still very close to it.

His work's in Latin, but here's the translation.

And this bit says, "Mortality destroyed more than a third

"of the men, women and children.

"As a result, there was such a shortage of servants,

"craftsmen and workmen, and of agricultural workers and labourers,

"that a great many lords and people, although well endowed with goods

"and possessions, were yet without all service and attendance."

With millions of workers dead, I want to find out what effect

that had on society once the plague had passed.

Professor John Hatcher is an economic historian at Cambridge,

specialising in how the Black Death transformed Britain.

John, can you tell me what happens when, potentially, nearly half

the population of a country dies?

Well, it's a very special country at the time

because of how agricultural it is.

Land becomes abundant and people become scarce.

So wages rise

because workers are scarce.

And the consequence of that, of course, is the landowners

have the threat of the disorderly peasantry, demanding far more

in pay, but also they're demanding freedom from serfdom.

And just to quote one of the commentators of the period,

"His world was turned upside down."

You'd think that it would cause total societal breakdown and chaos,

but it doesn't really, does it?

No, it doesn't. Why is that?

If you compare it with modern times, what you've got is people,

the bulk of the population, 80%, producing their own food.

Oh! So they're like...

They have to plough the land.

There may be death and destruction all around them,

they have to keep supplying their own land.

You haven't got huge supply lines for the majority of people. Er...

Today, society would collapse because you've got so few people

who are actually producing their own subsistence. Yes.

But in those days, of course, the situation is very direct.

And what evidence is there that these people

in the labour market were demanding higher wages?

So the scarcity of labour makes itself felt immediately.

People can get work anywhere.

They can demand the wages that they want.

And there's a splendid description of a ploughman ploughing

in the finery of a noble.

He's been given it, it's got a few holes in it.

But nevertheless there he is, with his plough in the mud,

wearing the clothes of a nobleman!

And the clothes have been handed to him as a bribe

to stay and work, to keep working.

Wow! So if I were at the peasant level of society,

ironically, the Black Death might be good for me if I survived

because I'd have more access to more food?

Yes, absolutely.

And also, of course, you inherited the property of your family.

Sometimes a large number of family members would die in succession,

leaving the single person with the property

of five or six people beforehand.

It was a transformation.

So did this new normal last?

Perhaps, as you might expect, the ruling classes in England,

at least, tried to make sure it didn't by rushing

through a new national statute, or law.

This great long thing here, is a copy

of the Statute of Labourers from 1351,

so just after the plague.

A translation here tells us what it's all about.

It 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 pestilence

"unless for outrageous wages."

It says that they have to take employment for the same

wages as before

or else they were going to get imprisoned.

Hmm, it also says that you're not allowed to leave the town

where you work to go and work elsewhere in the summer.

But then, they admit that this isn't going to work.

You CAN go to help with the harvest if you live in Staffordshire,

Lancashire, Derbyshire, Wales or Scotland.

That is going to be needed to make the country work.

With the ruling classes trying to reinstate the old social order,

but with the peasants gaining opportunities for a new life,

what does this mean for farming communities like Walsham?

And what happened to Olivia Cranmer?

I know that all the male members of her family are dead.

But Olivia survives.

A single entry in the Walsham court rolls describes her fate.

The lord of the manor wants rent and tax from the Cranmer lands,

so a radical decision is made.

Olivia is listed as heir...

..and granted tenancy of around 40 acres

of the Cranmer holdings.

Now, I had been thinking of Olivia as a sort of a freak accident.

If this were a newspaper headline, it might say,

"Amazing! Walsham woman does well out of Black Death."

But have a look at this.

You go through the court rolls, there are lots of other examples

of women inheriting land from men.

Here we've got Agnes Wodebite...

..and Catherine Deith.

And over here we've got Alice Rampolye.

And these women's names are appearing for the first time

because for the first time, they're economically relevant.

And I'm wondering if this is happening on a super local

level in Walsham, what's happening across the nation?

Is it possible there's evidence for other women coming

out of the shadows, if you like, in the wake of the Black Death?

Professor Caroline Barron has done extensive research

into opportunities for women in post-plague London.

Inevitably, there was a great deal of confusion afterwards.

But gradually, what you see is that women are emerging,

holding down jobs, being apprenticed as girl apprentices

to men and to women, taking over workshops

and running them as successful enterprises after the Black Death.

So where a business owner had died,

his wife might sort of be forced, economically, to take it over?

Yes, and you find after the Black Death that the cities

expects a widow to continue to train her husband's apprentices,

and they encouraged her to run his business.

And in fact, they actually made it possible for a woman

who was a widow to become a freewoman of London

and have the economic privileges that a Freeman of London

would have had. Interesting.

Are there specific women that you've been able to research?

Well, in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death,

quite interestingly, William Ramsay was the chief Mason

of the king, the Master Mason.

He died in the Black Death, and his daughter,

called Agnes, clearly took over the business from him.

We 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, yeah. Wow!

And she is called Dame Agnes Ramsay in the records.

That's extraordinary! And they recognised this position

that she's achieved, so it shows you that women could do things.

Amazing. What's this record you've got here?

Does this tell one of their stories?

Yes, this is the indenture of Margaret,

the daughter of Richard Bishop of Seaford, near Lewes.

And she's apprenticing herself to a man called John Pritchett,

citizen and tollisor, which means a toll collector, of London.

And Berger, his wife...

..a telder maker, which is a tentmaker.

A tent maker? She's going to learn to be a tentmaker?

She's going to learn the craft of the said Berger,

so it's quite specific, although she's apprenticed

to the husband and wife, it says she's going to learn the craft

of the wife, and to be the apprentice.

Was this a bit like during the world wars of the 20th century?

The men weren't there, the women had to take over?

Absolutely, it's like the munitions factories in the First World War.

Or Rosie the Riveter in the Second World War in America.

It's all to do with the shortage of population.

As a new disease, the Black Death's impact was horrific.

And for a short while, the death of half the population

saw social order upended.

Britain's peasant class tasted freedom and empowerment.

And despite efforts to return things back to pre-plague conditions,

many had seen their prospects change fundamentally.

None more so than Olivia Cranmer.

She does well enough out of her inherited land to retire

with a pension in later life.

She never remarried.

The court rolls now name her Olivia of Cranmer,

and it looks like she may have lived into her 60s,

a ripe old age for the 14th century.

Plague would return to 14th-century Britain.

With each new wave, herd immunity built up.

But it took 300 years for Britain's population to get back

to pre-pandemic levels.

And the psychological impact of the Black Death lasted generations.

This image is the Danse Macabre.

It's one of the iconic images of the Black Death, isn't it?

Skeletons enjoying themselves.

But it's really striking to me that it dates from well

over a century after the Black Death of 1348.

I think it shows the lasting psychological impact of the plague,

which kept coming back and back again, and it made

people re-evaluate life.

If life was a dance with death,

if death could come and take you at any moment, well...

..then better enjoy life while you can.

The princes in the Tower.

How did a power struggle for the English throne lead

to the mysterious disappearance of two young boys?

During the Wars of the Roses, it's dog eat dog.

You are winning power using violence, or you're toast.