When the Black Death Plague hit medieval England, it left a trail of destruction in its wake.
Up to half of the population was wiped out by the plague, which makes you wonder - what
happened to all the bodies of Black Death plague victims?
Imagine this - the year is 1348, and you are just a poor, humble monk from a small parish
in the countryside near London, England.
You live an ordinary monk’s life, serving the poor rural people.
But today is no ordinary day.
Today, you’ve taken the long journey from the countryside into the city to attend the
Royal Courts.
You can scarcely believe it, but today you are going to be speaking to the King of England!
You can’t help but be excited, even if your mission here is a grim one.
After waiting for hours in a crowded outer chamber, you are finally summoned into His
Majesty's presence.
You’re sweating profusely under your monk’s robes as you focus on making it through the
formalities without embarrassing yourself or accidentally insulting the King.
“Your Majesty,” you say, “There is a plague preying upon your loyal subjects.
The first sign of illness is a sudden fever and weakness, which quickly progresses to
swollen lumps in the armpits, neck or groin, followed by a blackening of the skin.
Most who catch this dreadful disease die a horrible, painful death within just a few
days.”
“Yes, yes,” the King says, irritably.
“I’m aware of this pestilence.
There have been reports from all over the realm for months now.
What exactly do you expect me to do about it?
Shouldn’t you monks be praying about it or something?”
Uh oh!
This isn’t going the way you had hoped it would.
You scramble to turn things around.
“Of course, your Majesty is right.
Your faithful people do not blame you for the plague, nor do they expect you to end
it.
Sire, the reason I’ve come all this way is rather more...practical.”
“Well, what is it then?” he growls.
“Get on with it!”
“It’s the bodies, Sire,” you say in a rush.
“They are piling up faster than we can bury them.”
“Well, get some more grave diggers!” shouts the King.
“Of course, your Majesty, excellent advice.
But, ah… the thing is...we are quite rapidly running out of room for the bodies in our
graveyard.
In the last week we’ve had dozens of deaths in just our small parish alone, and it’s
only getting worse by the day.
The huge number of bodies that must be buried are quickly filling up our little graveyard,
and threatening the prime plots reserved for our gracious nobles.
We’ll be out of space completely in a matter of days at this rate!”
Now the King actually looks worried.
“We knew that this plague was bad,” he says, “but we had no idea it was this deadly.
We’ve heard of a few cases around the city, but nothing like what you describe.
If what you say is true, and if it were to spread to the cities, we would be drowning
in bodies!”
The King is quiet for a few moments, as he ponders all that you’ve told him.
Finally, he looks at you and says:
“It’s settled, then.
Monk, I am making you my official Master of Body Disposal.
You are charged with overseeing all aspects of the handling and disposal of the bodies
of the victims of this dreadful plague.
You have the full backing of the Crown and all of our resources available to you, so
there is no excuse for failure.”
You can’t believe it.
You don’t know what you were expecting, but it wasn’t this.
You’re grateful you’ll have the resources you need to help your parish, but the new
responsibility you have is daunting, to say the least.
The King has already dismissed you and moved on to the next petitioner, so you carefully
leave the chamber - being careful never to turn your back on His Royal Majesty - and
begin the long journey home.
You have a lot to think about.
By the time you arrive back at your church, you are full of plans and ideas.
The first order of business is to use your new power and influence to secure some extra
land.
Using the King’s resources, you purchase several acres of land adjoining your graveyard
from a local Lord, and quickly consecrate it, since being buried outside of an official
church graveyard was considered a terrible fate for your eternal soul.
Next, you turn your attention to the burial practices themselves.
Before the plague broke out, people were used to being around death and bodies.
People died at home, their bodies were laid out in the Church for days of prayer and vigils,
and the church’s graveyard did double-duty as a public gathering space.
The bond between the living and the dead was strong, and the dead were kept close at hand.
But with the fear of the plague spreading as fast as the disease itself, people are
starting to fear the dead, believing their bodies might spread the disease.
One of the most radical measures you implement is a ban on some traditional funeral practices.
Families will no longer be able to have their loved one’s body displayed in the Church,
and family members won't be allowed to attend the burial, which will take place more quickly.
Another huge change will be the shift from individual burials to mass graves.
Instead of individual graves, which take up more time and space, large pits are dug, and
the bodies are wrapped in shrouds and carefully arranged in rows until the pit is full.
You take care to ensure each and every departed soul receives appropriate funeral rites, even
if it’s a shared, stripped down, more practical version.
Finally, in a stroke of self-professed brilliance, you sprinkle the earth near the pits with
vinegar, since you believe it helps to stop the spread of the plague.
A few weeks later, although the plague continues to rage, the body situation in your parish
is much more under control.
You’re feeling pretty good about yourself and the progress you’ve made, when a messenger
arrives with an urgent summons from the King.
He wants to see you in London immediately.
This can’t be good...
The King barely lets you get through your kneeling and grovelling before he tears into
you.
“You’re supposed to be my Master of Body Disposal!
I put you in charge of managing the bodies from this dratted plague.
So why, pray tell, are the bodies piling up in the streets of my city!”
You know you need to act quickly to save your own neck - literally.
The King has a reputation for separating the heads of those who displease him from their
bodies.
By some miracle, though, you escape with your head intact.
But you also have a huge new responsibility - clearing the bodies of Black Death plague
victims from the King’s cities.
You know that you won’t be given another chance to redeem yourself.
You get right to work tackling the new challenge of managing bodies in an urban setting.
Although the King told you of the shocking methods he has heard about being used in other
countries, such as burning the bodies or burying them on unconsecrated ground, you can’t
bring yourself to violate your religious vows, even in the midst of a plague.
So, you implement the same changes to funeral rites and burial practices as you did in the
countryside, but you quickly realize that much more drastic measures will be needed
in the densely populated urban areas.
You order mass graves to be dug on any plot of available land throughout the city to accommodate
the tens of thousands of bodies.
These plague pits, as they would go on to be known, are much larger and deeper than
the modest mass graves in the countryside.
In some areas, bodies are stacked as much as six feet deep before a pit is filled in.
In the densely populated cities, fear and hysteria can spread just as fast as the disease
itself.
To combat the fear, you implement a law that requires any home with a sick person in it
to be marked with a red cross and the occupants to be sealed inside.
You assign Watchers to keep guard over marked homes to ensure no one leaves and to pass
along supplies.
People are rightfully unnerved at the sight of bodies being moved through the city, so
you hire teams of Searchers and Bearers to handle the bodies at night under the cover
of darkness.
Searchers are people, usually women, whose job it is to examine dead bodies and determine
if they had died of the plague.
Bearers would pull a cart through the city streets at night calling out “Bring out
your dead!” and collecting the bodies of plague victims who had died that day.
Due to the unsavory nature of their jobs, Searchers, Bearers and Grave Diggers were
forced to identify themselves publicly, and remain apart from society - which suited most
of them just fine, as Bearers and Grave Diggers were usually rough, drunken men - they were
even known to rob the corpses of victims.
Sadly, like up to half of the population of England, you, our brave and ingenious Monk,
will not survive the Black Death plague.
Despite your best efforts, an estimated one third to one half of the population of London
died in the plague, so you might have succumbed to the disease yourself - although we wouldn’t
be surprised if you met a more...sinister end at the hands of a displeased King.
But your legacy lives on, and modern scientists, architects and even developers continue to
find evidence of your work all over England.
Plague pits have been unearthed all over modern London.
There’s the Lincolnshire mass grave with 48 skeletons, including 27 children, stacked
neatly in rows.
Charterhouse Square in Farringdon is the largest mass grave in London, home to an estimated
50,000 victims of the Black Death plague.
Historical records tell us that the Bishop of London purchased a property outside the
city, dubbed “No Man’s Land”, to bury plague victims, and that, when it quickly
filled, a local landowner bought the adjacent 13-acre property, where excavations have revealed
bodies stacked 5 feet deep in places.
From historical records, we can also learn about the immediate aftermath of the hasty
mass burials of plague victims.
Sources mention many “annoyances” in the wake of the plague, including “terrible
stenches” as bits of coffins, shrouds and decomposing bodies found their way to the
surface.
Churches spent small fortunes filling and leveling the sites of these plague pits to
deal with the “unpleasantness”.
The East Smithfield cemetery in London was used only during the Black Death of 1348-1349,
so the 600 bodies buried there can tell us a lot about the plague’s victims.
From studying these skeletons, we have learned that the death rate among royals and higher
nobility was as low as 5%, compared to 45% among the clergy.
Researchers Sharon N. DeWitte from the University of South Carolina and Marianne Kowaleski from
Fordham University published a paper in 2017 about the Eastfield bodies, and they concluded
that “the elderly, those who were impoverished, and those who suffered relatively poor health
faced higher risks of death than their younger, wealthier and healthier peers.”
The plague left social legacies, too.
The labor shortages resulting from the staggering death rates accelerated the decline of serfdom
and the rise of the peasant class, as new opportunities opened up to poor, indentured
serfs.
The Black Death also drastically changed the way people thought about death - once accepted
as the inevitable conclusion to a well-lived Christian life, death was now a thing to fear,
something that could strike you down without warning and wipe out entire families and communities.
The horrors of what happened to the bodies of Black Death plague victims forever changed
the relationship between the living and the dead.
If you thought this video was fascinating, then you have to check out our other videos,
like this one called “Where Did All The Titanic Bodies Disappear To?”; or, you might
like this other video, instead.