Hello everyone and welcome back to the History of England, episode 108, what is the black

death ever done for you?

Last week we heard a bit about the black death and its arrival in the medieval world.

We tried to avoid the numbers, but this week there's no escape.

This time we're going to join the long lasting debate about the impact and legacy of the

black death and that's going to avoid numbers.

The first number has of course to be, how many people actually died in England.

If you relied on the chroniclers to estimate numbers you'd go mad pretty quickly.

Numbers are traditionally not their strong point, they take the fishermen the one that got

a way approach.

The thing they do give you though is an idea of how it felt, and it felt like meltdown,

like the end of the world.

Most chroniclers therefore talk about more than half of the population dying and all

the way up to 90% of the population dying.

It's pretty clearly accepted that these are overestimates, which do more to demonstrate

the horror and impact of the plague, more than give an accurate record of the actual numbers

of deaths.

But one of the joys of studying medieval history in England is that we are comparatively

well served by documentary evidence, comparative to other places that is.

And that means that the best stab we can make at numbers is with the clergy, whether

a good ecclesiastical records kept about the number of benefits clergy who die and need

to be replaced during the period.

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