THE PLAGUE ARRIVES IN ENGLAND

 

THE PLAGUE ARRIVES IN ENGLAND

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On the 8th May 1348, two ships from Bordeaux sailed into the harbour of Melcombe Regis in Dorset, now known as Weymouth.

Among the ships cargo, were rats carrying the deadly disease.

Infected ship rats would die, but their fleas would often survive and find new rat hosts

Rats can travel great distances in grain, and clothing, and the plague soon reached outlying towns and villages.

The disease was both infectious and highly contagious.

It was fatal to breathe the air around the victim or touch him. People were so terrified that they often deserted their families and friends and left them to die alone.

At the onset of the disease swellings appeared in the armpits and in the groin, followed by gangrene in the throat and lungs and acute pain.

The victim vomited blood and the body gave off a vile stench.

The plague was most virulent in the south east corner of Devon. Colyton was the worst village, but all the villages around were badly infected.

Colyton lost four vicars in seven months.

Twenty monks and three brothers were buried at Newnham Abbey, which was close to the Dorset border where the plague first struck.

Elsewhere employers found it difficult to get workers, because so many had died of the plague.

Beasts and cattle strayed everywhere, as no-one was left to tend them.

Exeter, with a population of three thousand lost 1900 to the disease.

Geoffrey le Baker, an Oxford clerk, wroteabout the description of the spread throughout England~

“At first it carried off almost all the inhabitants of the seaports in Dorset, and then those living inland, and from there it raged so dreadfully through Dorset and Somerset as far as Bristol.

The men of Gloucester refused to allow people from Bristol into their region, as they all thought that the breath of those who lived amongst people who died of plague was infectious.

But at last it attacked Gloucester, yea and Oxford and London, and finally the whole of England so violently that scarce one in ten of either sex was left alive.

As the graveyards did not suffice, fields were chosen for the burial of the dead.

A countless number of common people and a host of monks and nuns and clerics as well, known to God alone, passed away.

It was the young and strong that the plague chiefly attacked.

This great pestilence, raged for a whole year in England so terribly that it cleared many country villages entirely of every human being.”

The total of deaths in the country was estimated to be almost three million.

The number of deaths worldwide was 25 million.

Europe lost half its population.

The Black Death was a calamity of colossal magnitude.

Up to that time, nothing in the history of the world was comparable to it.

It stood alone for its awful fatality......

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http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_events/black_death.php

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https://ko-fi.com/thetudorintruders

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Miniature from theToggenburg Bible, believed to be the plague~1411