THE BLACK DEATH (1348 - 1350)

It happened several times in England.

We started calling this illness the black death in the 17th century, before it was called the
grand pestilence. It was bubonic, at least at the beginning. It was transmitted by the fleas.
The name was related to the black marks it caused in the skin.
One of the most affected countries was Greece, and transported the rats with the fleas in the
ships. Two of the main problems England had was that clean water was hard to find, they
used polluted water to drink, the same that they threw rubbish onto, and also they didn't had
good hygiene (they didn't had baths and lived crowded, specially the poor), and the other
problem was that the church had promoted the idea of cats being evil creatures, and deviled
creatures, so many cats had been sacrificed and they were nowhere around to stop the rats
that carried the illness.
This plague mutated from being bubonic to be pneumonic. At this moment it got much
worse, and there were some places where everyone died.
The way that this illness affected the work population was one of the causes for the
peasants revolt.

[paréntesis]
The 100 year war started with Edward III fighting with France, claiming to be the king of
England and France. These ideas started with Edward the Confessor bringing the French to
the country as advisers and with William I being Duke of Normandy and King of England at
the same time.
This war lasted 115 years, but had some periods of passive war with no fights, like it
happened at the time of the black death because the plague was affecting both countries
and they didn't have the resources to continue fighting.
[paréntesis]

The amount of people dying from the plague caused important changes in several aspects.
In the economic sense there were less workers because many of them had died.
Another economic consequence was that with a lot of people dead there was more food for
the people that survived. This caused an increase in the quality of their diets, because
before there was not enough fruit, vegetables or meat for some of them.

In a social aspect, there were a lot of kids without parents and a lot of women without
husbands, so this caused an increase in marriage rates with the people left alive (one,
because it was not well seen to be a widowed alone and two because they needed to
increase natality).

In a political sense in this period the people started questioning the advisers of the king and
the church as an institution.

In a religious aspect, one of the things they thought about the plague was that it was carried
out by God because of them being sinful, but the illness affecting the church authorities and
the priest made them question them and started thinking the church was also corrupted.
Also, some groups started blaming the illness on the jews, they started thinking they were
responsible for this and they sent them away from the city. This idea was reinforced because
very few jewish died of this illness, but just because they were in the countryside and this
condition made them less in touch with the vector.