Hi there, it's Keir Comedal here, host of Penny's Appounds, the online platform making

your financial lifestyle accessible and fun. I'm working with legal in general to bring

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that. These weekly bite-sized episodes covered a Saturday didn't teach us at school, but

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1348 has to be one of the most dramatic years in European history. The outbreak of the

First World War and the Second World War are up there, but when you take the longer

view, 1348 was probably far more important. Through that year, the Black Death swept

across the continent, carrying away somewhere in the region of 40% of the population in

just two years. Take a moment to consider this. Wherever you are now, take a look around.

I'm talking about every other person on your commuter train or in the car passing by

or the people walking up and down the streets beside your house. They're suddenly gone.

Now, what I'm talking about is not the work of fiction. It's not fantasy, but something

that happened and people at the time left us accounts of what this was like. Listen

to these words written in Mayne's Briabi, in Wilshire, in England, in 1350, read by

Aiden Crowe from my new audio book on the Black Death.

The cruel pestilence, hateful to all future ages, leaving not a city, a town, a village

or even, except rarely, a house, without killing most or all of the people there, so that

all over England as a whole, a fifth of men, women and children were carried to burial.

Hateful to all future ages is certainly one way to punish. So deadly was this plague that

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