The Black Death
Did It Save English?
Fig. 1. Dans Macabre
In general, most
people think it was the
bubonic plague,
Yersinia Pestis.
(A few people think perhaps
anthrax, a mutation of
cattle murrain, hemorrhagic
fever, or some unknown
disease.)
Fig. 2. Yersinia Pestis Microbes
Other Names for the Black Death:
The Blue Sickness (the medieval British name for it)
Bilbos (The medieval Italian word for it, literally “swellings”)
“La Pest” (The medieval French word for it)
Pestilencia Magna (The Latin words for “the Great Plague”)
Ko-ta-Wen (The Mongolian word for it )
Ta-Wun (The Mandarin Chinese word for it, literally. “Sore-sore”)
Ta’un (The Arabic word for it)
Today, we call it the black plague or the bubonic plague—but these
terms did not appear until hundreds of years later.
Fig. 3. Map of plague routes out of China
It seems to have come from Central Asia:
Mongolian records mentioned it in 1333, 1338, and 1339.
Chinese and Indian records mentioned it in 1346.
In Europe, it showed up at the Black Sea port of Kaffa in 1347.
Fig. 4. Kipchak Khan Janibeg: Mongolian general who
besieged the port city of Kaffa
Medieval people believed (probably falsely) that Mongols under Kipchak Khan
Janibeg catapulted corpses infected with plague into the trading city of Kaffa in
the Crimean region.
From Kaffa, the plague kept spreading!
1347
1348
1349
Alexandria, Egypt and Messina, Sicily
Genoa and Venice in Italy
Aberdeen, Scotland and Avignon, France
Fig. 5. Map of plague route into Europe taken from “Black Death Pogroms” at
http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch
And spreading !
1349 Paris, France;
and Mecca, Arabia
1350 All of the
Scandinavian
Peninsula;
Baghdad in the
Mid-East
1351 Kiev, Russia
. . . and spreading!
Fig. 3. Map of plague routes out of China
How is plague spread?
Fig. 6. Black rat climbing a chain, from ZooFacts.com
Fleas on rats spread it.
The disease later could become airborne!
Medieval hygiene was
often poor, and many
people had fleas or lice.
Fig. 7: Pullex Irritans, the human flea
The European
black rats also
carried their own
species of fleas, and
the rats themselves
were mostly
immune to the
deadly plague.
Fig. 8: Rattus Rattus, the European Black Rat
They were also
great swimmers,
climbers, and
escape artists,
which made them
hard to quarantine.
Infected rat fleas, however,
will also bite humans if they
can’t feed on rats, and thus
humans catch the disease.
Once humans are infected,
the bacteria can build up in
their lungs. They can then
cough up microscopic
particles of blood, making the
disease airborne!
Fig. 9: Xenopsylla Cheopis, the rat flea--this pregnant
female is heavy with eggs, which are visible
as a black spot near her tail
Stage I: Fever, trembling, and
weakness
Stage II: Huge blue or purple
“buboes” or swellings in the
armpits, throat, and thighs.
Stage III: Coughing and peeing
blood!
Stage IV: Death!
Fig. 10: Image of Black Death as a Minstrel
Q: How many people died?
A: It varied from place to
place.
Overall, probably one-in-three people died in Europe (perhaps 50-70 million)
and maybe 220 million worldwide. The world probably only had 500 million
people before the plague outbreak. Some places were hit very hard and others
hardly touched.
Florence, Italy (90% dead)
Sedlec, Czechoslovakia (70% dead)
Caux, Normandy (66% dead)
Paris, France (42% dead)
Genoa, Italy (35% dead)
Dublin, Ireland (35% dead)
Avignon, France (33% dead)
Some 3,000 European villages had “absolute
population loss” (which means 100% of the
people either died or ran away).
The New World (no deaths)
Hawaii, Polynesian Islands (no
deaths)
Galway, Ireland (no deaths )
Lindisfarne, Ireland (no deaths)
Western Scotland (no deaths)
Pharoese Island (no deaths)
Inland Central Africa (no deaths)
Sub-Saharan Africa (2% dead)
Burgundy, France (4% dead)
Amsterdam, Holland (5% dead)
Isolated farms, villages, and islands were
least likely to suffer a pandemic.
So how did such an awful disease
help“save” English?
To understand that, we have
to back up in time, and see
how the French language
almost became the language
of Britain before the plague
hit.
The image to the right is the first page of
Beowulf. It is written in Anglo-Saxon around
800 AD. Anglo-Saxon, or “Old English,” is
the ancestor of English today.
Fig. 11. (right) The first page of Beowulf. Cotton Vitellius
A.x.v. 129 r
Edward the Confessor, king of England, died without
children to claim his throne. Afterward, three warriors
fought to be king.
Fig. 12: Bayeux Tapestry depiction of King Edward
the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king
Each one had a large army, and each one spoke a
different language.
Fig. 13: Harald Hardraadi the
Viking (his army spoke Old
Norse)
Fig. 14: Harold Godwinson of Wessex (his
army spoke Anglo-Saxon)
Fig. 15: William the Conqueror (his
army spoke Norman French)
A Viking conqueror (Harald Hardraadi)
A local Anglo-Saxon ruler (Harold Godwinson)
A French warlord (Duke William of Normandy)
 It was a messy fight! Earl Godwinson’s army beat up the
Viking one at Stambridge first.
 When Godwinson’s forces marched south to fight the French invaders. At
the start of the fight at Hastings, a lucky French bowman shot Godwinson
in the eye and killed him. Godwinson’s Anglo-Saxon army fell apart.
 Only the Frenchman, William the Conqueror, was left. Between 10661087, he took over of all England and became ruler.
Anglo-Saxon became nearly obsolete!
Under William’s French rule, all laws and government
documents were in French. All the nobles, priests,
bishops? They were now French!
English became the language of peasants and serfs. Between
1066-1348, no major English writings appeared again until
the last half of the 1300s. It looked bad for the English
language!
So what changed? What was different that let English make a
comeback and shook up the French rulers?
The Black Plague!
The Black Plague severely messed up
medieval England. It left a smaller number
of workers compared to the number of
aristocrats.
Yes, some noblemen did die, but not nearly as
many nobles died as peasants did.
That meant labor become rare. Nobles had to
offer incentives like land, money, or legal
benefits to keep peasants working.
Fig. 16: Holbein Woodcut of Death Serving at Nobleman’s Table
It also killed many French priests, bishops, and archbishops in England.
Good priests stayed to comfort the dying, and died themselves. Bad priests
ran away because they were scared, and they lost their credibility.
Because so many Norman French priests
died or ran away, the church in England
had to open up job positions to English
replacements, not just French ones.
Priests had to be able to read and write.
Now, English speakers—not just Norman
French—were increasingly able to do so.
Fig. 17: Holbein Woodcut of Bishop being led by Death
The next generation of workers suddenly had choices!
Don’t like working on the
local lord’s farm? Pack up
and move! Switch farms!
Join a labor guild!
Form a chartered town!
Become a mercenary!
Increasingly, the lower-class
English peasants were becoming
middle-class. They could demand
more money and more education.
Gradually, the English language—now
blended with French vocabulary—made
a comeback!.
Fig. 18: Holbein woodcut of Death trying to stop a soldier from leaving
English made a comeback! The language that develops next
is called “Middle English.” It’s a lot closer to our
language—but it’s spelled differently and pronounced
differently.
Middle English
That love laste wel a fourtenyght,
For it no lengere mihte laste,
So nyh my lif was ate laste.
Bot now, allas, to late war
That I ne hadde him loved ar:
For Deth cam so in haste bime,
Er I therto hadde eny time,
That it ne mihte ben achieved.
--John Gower,
Confessio Amantis, Book IV
Modern English
That love lasted only a fortnight,
But it might no longer last
Because my life was ebbing fast.
But now, sadly, too late I learned
That I had not loved this lad earlier.
For Death came himself so quickly
That there was no time,
That our love might not be achieved.
--John Gower,
Confessio Amantis, Book IV
Geoffrey Chaucer:
Finally, by the 1380s, Chaucer chose to write in
English rather than French!
Most British writers before 1348 choose
to use Latin or French, like John Gower.
Chaucer also did his early writings in French,
but he switched to English in The Book of the
Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, and The
Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer had been eight years old when the
Black Plague hit England. Those who
survived the generation of death lived in a
world with more land, more wealth, more
rights, and more English.
Fig. 19: Geoffrey Chaucer, adapted from the Hoccleve Portrait
However, traces of the Black Plague may still persist in
some creepy phrases today, ranging from Shakespeare to
children’s rhymes!
Ring around the rosies,
A pocketful of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.
--children’s rhyme (first recorded
in 19th century, but may date
back to the 1400s)
“A plague a’ both your houses!”
--Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,
Act I, Scene 3, line 91
Finis!
That’s How the Black Death Saved English!
Fig. 1. Hans Holbein. Dans Macabre. 15th-Century Woodcut. Lyons, 1538.
Fig. 2. Yersinia Pestis. Taken from “Black Death Pogroms” <http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/MA/judentum
EncJud_pest-black-death-pogroms-1348-1350-ENGL.html>. 14 May 2012. Web.
Fig. 3. Adapted from Geoffrey Mars’ The Medieval Plague: The Black Death and the Middle Ages. New York: Doubleday,
1971. 1.
Fig. 4. Kipchak Khan Janibeg. Beijing. 16th-Century Scroll Painting.
Fig. 5. Map of Plague route into Europe taken from “Black Death Pogroms” at
<http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch >. 14 May 2012. Web.
Figs. 6-9. All animal images taken from ZooFacts.com. 14 May 2012. Web.
Fig. 10. Anonymous. Death as Minstrel. N.p. N.d..
Fig. 11. First page of Beowulf. Cotton Vitellius MS A.x.v. 129 r. As reproduced in Julius Zupitza's Beowulf: Autotypes of
the
Unique Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv. in the British Museum with a Transliteration and Notes. E.E.T.S. O.S. 77. London:
Trubner & Co., 1882.
Figs. 12-15 Foys, Martin K. Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition. Individual license ed; CD-ROM, 2003.
Figs. 16-18 Hans Holbein. Alphabet of Death. 15th-Century Woodcut. Lyons, 1538.
Fig. 19 Geoffrey Chaucer. Adapted from the Thomas Hoccleve Portrait. Early 15th century.
All other images free clipart from clipart.com.
--gratias tibi!