Ken Follett's Journey Into the Dark Ages (2012) s01e01 Episode Script
Black Death
In October 1347, a deadly epidemic of bubonic plague spread across Europe.
It came to be known as the Black Death.
In two and a half years, this plague killed 25 million people.
I'm Ken Follett, author of two best-selling novels set in the Middle Ages, The Pillars Of The Earth and World Without End.
I set my novel World Without End at the time of the Black Death.
The book draws on the stories of real people and events and on the latest historical research.
I was surprised by what I found as I read of Europe descending into anarchy.
The Black Death struck me as one of the greatest dramas in the history of the human race.
It killed at least a third, maybe half the population of Europe, and yet because it undermined existing conservative hierarchies, it was also the cause of a surge forward in progress.
Paradoxically, the Black Death was progressive.
The Black Death affected almost every single person in Europe.
I was fascinated by the stories of three remarkable, brave individuals who lived through the Black Death - a doctor in Florence, Italy a monk in the cathedral town of Winchester a farm girl and her family in rural England.
I discovered through their true stories that out of the Black Death, new thinking, new science and new hope burst into life and turned the world upside down.
In the small village of Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, England, an elderly peasant farmer, William Cranmer, fell seriously ill in the spring of 1349.
It started with a headache.
A few hours later, boils erupted all over his body.
His granddaughters, Hilary and Olivia, had never seen symptoms like it.
They suspected it was the Great Pestilence, the epidemic that had ravaged much of Europe.
Within a day, William Cranmer was dead.
If it really was the plague, then Hilary and Olivia knew that nobody in the Cranmer family was safe.
The first signs of the Black Death in Europe had come a year and a half earlier, in October 1347.
A small fleet of Genoese ships returned from the Crimea.
The sailors had come into contact with an unknown sickness.
By the time the ships reached Sicily, many of the sailors were dead and dying.
The mysterious disease spread throughout Italy.
In January 1348, there were plague cases in the north, not far from the city of Florence.
Florence in the early 14th century was one of the great cities of Europe.
It was a centre of manufacturing, finance and trade, being a crucial link between the Christian world and the East.
It was a prosperous city, bustling with people - ideal conditions for the spread of a plague epidemic like the Black Death.
Florence, like the rest of Europe, had not witnessed a major epidemic in 700 years.
They had no idea what was about to hit them.
By March 1348, the Black Death was at the city gates.
The authorities believed the plague spread through foul odours in the dirty streets.
When the Florentine authorities heard of the approaching plague, they ordered the city cleared of its rubbish, but the narrow streets of medieval cities were absolutely filthy, and anyway, nothing could stop the plague.
The Santa Maria Nuova is one of the oldest hospitals in Florence.
It's still a working hospital today.
When the plague hit Florence in 1348, the wards quickly filled up with patients with strange boils, or buboes.
Their condition was described by the contemporary Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio.
"The sickness began with a swelling of the groin and armpits.
"The tumours varied in size and soon appeared all over the body.
"The disease then altered in nature, "with black or livid spots everywhere.
" These were a certain sign of impending death.
People in terrible agony, had terrible headaches.
One of the symptoms was an unquenchable thirst that was so awful that sometimes people threw themselves in rivers and drowned because they couldn't quench their thirst.
I want to tell you the story of a remarkable doctor who worked in this hospital at the time of the plague.
He became a pioneer of medical science.
Dr Francesco Guarini was both a pharmacist and a doctor, so at first he prescribed common herbal potions.
He used leeches for blood-letting, to cleanse the body of poison.
It was a common method, but it was ineffective.
Dr Guarini could not stop his patients dying.
The plague had no known cure.
He thought he had to clean the pus out of the buboes, but cleaning them greatly increased the danger of contagion.
There was little the doctors could do.
They had few instruments.
Dr Guarini knew that the plague was highly contagious, and that he was in serious danger.
The hospital's monks refused to visit the dying, but Guarini would not leave his patients.
He did what little he could to ease their pain.
The bubonic plague spread fast.
The Italian writer Boccaccio wrote "This pestilence spread from the ill to the healthy "like fire among dry wood.
"It was communicated even by touching the clothes of the sick, "or anything they had touched.
" Dr Francesco Guarini had no remedy for this deadly infection.
People didn't know about germs, but they did know that illness is passed from one person to another, cos that's obvious.
They didn't know how it passed.
Some people felt it was through the eyes.
A beam of light from the eye would pass illness to somebody you looked at.
Others thought it came from the breath, much closer to what we now understand to be the truth.
At the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, I met historian Dr Esther Diana, an expert on its long history.
The main 14th-century treatment room, where the doctors worked, has been preserved.
It's more of a chapel.
At the time, an illness was seen as a divine punishment.
First and foremost, the sick therefore had to re-establish their bond with God.
It was seen as more important to cure the soul than to cure the body.
Medical practice in the 14th century was a mixture of religious belief, ignorance and outright quackery.
Well, here's a typical medieval recipe.
Cut out a verse from the Bible, from a parchment Bible, grind it up, dissolve it in wine and drink it.
That was a classic medieval remedy, and, of course, completely useless.
The vast majority of doctors were from the priesthood, and had more interest in spiritual remedies than physical cures.
Dr Guarini was different.
Francesco Guarini was a secular doctor, not religious, and he was a pharmacist, a very important role, because most doctors of the time didn't have any training to deal with diseases.
Francesco Guarini's methods were advanced for their time but he was handicapped because no-one had discovered the origins of the disease that ravaged Florence in 1348.
Professor Johannes Krause of Tubingen University is part of a team of scientists who researched the unsolved mysteries of the Black Death.
The bubonic plague is actually a rodent disease, usually living in wild rodent populations like squirrels or marmots and from them, it can jump to domestic rodents like mice, rats.
Rat fleas feed on the blood of infected rats.
The fleas bite the rat and suck this infected blood into their stomachs.
In the blood, you have this bacteria.
It's clever, it produces a protein which clogs the stomach of the fleas.
Because the blood in its stomach has coagulated, the flea cannot digest it.
The rat flea abandons the rat and bites a nearby human.
When he bites the next time, he has to vomit all the blood from his stomach into the bite.
What happens is that the bite gets infected, it turns into these buboes, these bulbs and the infection spreads into the whole body.
So you have this bubo and from that bubo, it goes into all organs.
The organs fail, they rupture.
It goes into the blood and after usually five to ten days, you die a pretty horrible death.
Once the plague had infected a human, the disease could be passed on from person to person by coughing.
The people of Florence waited in terror for their inevitable death.
The Black Death had reached Florence.
The people of the city managed their fears in different ways.
Those who could afford it left the city, secluded themselves in the country, tried to stay away from all human contact.
But others figured eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
So, they ate everything there was to eat.
They drank everything there was to drink.
And they had amazing sex orgies in which they just had sex with anybody they wanted to.
The writer, Boccaccio, described what happened.
"Some believed that drinking, going about singing and having fun, "satisfying all their appetites as much as they could, "was sure medicine for any illness.
"They spent day and night drinking without a mode or measure, "engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure.
"And they combined this bestial behaviour with as complete "and avoidance of the sick as they could manage.
" Within weeks, tens of thousands were dead.
Whole families were wiped out.
The cemeteries filled up, and still there was no end in sight.
The plague devastated Italy.
It moved along the Mediterranean coast and into northern France.
And across the English Channel, in southern England, people braced themselves.
Winchester was one of Medieval England's richest cities, with a large population of 10,000.
It lies just 20 miles inland.
Winchester inspired the fictitious city of Kingsbridge in my novel, World Without End.
Historian, Dan Jones, is an expert on 14th century England.
He has investigated the dramatic history of Winchester at the time of the Black Death.
People in Winchester would have known for months probably, that the plague was coming, it was spreading through Europe and it was killing vast numbers of people.
Mediaeval Winchester was dominated by its magnificent cathedral and the almighty Catholic Church, which taught that it was the only link between humans and the divine.
Priests looked for an explanation for the approaching epidemic.
There's a massive problem explaining where the plague has come from.
Psychologically, the plague is really hard for people to deal with and there's only one way to interpret it to the mediaeval mind, which is that this is a punishment from God for the sins of man.
But the question the church in Winchester had to answer was what terrible sin would merit such horrific punishment? The priesthood found its authority under attack.
The Church always explained illness as some kind of punishment.
An epidemic illness was explained as a punishment for epidemic sins.
When the Black Death first reached England in the late summer of 1348, people of Winchester looked to their bishop to protect them.
The Bishop was William Edington, buried here in the Cathedral.
But what would he do? The Bishop writes to the people of Winchester saying, "God's clearly very angry, we'd better make him happy.
" And he orders them to hold a procession through town to show their sorrow, their penance, their devotion to God in the hope that the plague would spare the people from the monastery, people from the church and the townsmen.
Bishop Edington proclaimed that a weekly procession was the best hope.
One of the clerics in the procession was brother Ralph de Staunton a monk documented in local records.
Before the plague, being a monk like Ralph de Staunton was probably a pretty good job.
You know, you have a place to live, good structure to your life, you're fed every day, live in pretty good conditions.
You're reasonably well respected by the people of the town.
In return, monks like Ralph, looked after people when they were ill.
They also helped people have a good death.
They come in helping people to physically die, making sure they were as comfortable as possible in an age without anaesthetic.
But it can also mean in the spiritual aspect, so taking confession from people, giving people advice of how to live a more godly life so that when their time comes to pass from Earth to heaven, or purgatory or the other place, then they are spiritually prepared for that.
Amen.
Death haunted the mediaeval imagination.
In the mediaeval mind, life on Earth was just the beginning of the spiritual journey to God.
The Church increasingly controlled how people die.
It can shorten your time in purgatory before you were sent to heaven.
That makes it a very powerful force on Earth.
So when the bishop ordered the processions to continue, the people obeyed, even when he retreated to his house in the country, well away from Winchester.
Having a procession through town, you know, would not seem like a very good idea now if the Black Death was coming.
What we'd do is isolate everybody.
Keep the sick people away from one another.
So, you could probably say having a procession through the middle of Winchester at the inception of this awful outbreak of plague, is one of the worst things you could do.
Ralph de Staunton, like everyone else in Winchester, had heard the terrifying reports of the approaching plague.
He could only do as his bishop told him and put his trust in the mercy of God.
At Christmas, 1348, the Black Death reached Winchester.
Imagine the streets of Winchester being full of people with the horrible signs of plague sickness.
The buboes in their skin, the horrible smell that emitted from your pores when you are sick with this.
There would have been no escaping the signs of the plague everywhere.
Ralph de Staunton had the most dangerous job in the world.
The faithful monk came into contact with sick people all the time, tending them to try to give them some semblance of a good death and ease them as best he could through their final hours.
There was a piece of advice given to priests who are hearing confession.
When the dying man is confessing and he wants to whisper don't lean forward like this.
Because the closer the priest leaned to the dying man, the more likely he was to catch the plague.
Ralph, and all the monks and priests of Winchester feared the plague.
They had a difficult choice, stick to their duty in the town or ignore the Bishop's instructions and run away and hide in the forest.
Of course, they knew their duty was to stay.
And almost none of them did.
If they have the chance to go, they went.
And I wish I was a hero, but I'm not.
I write about heroes and I think I would have been as weak as them and I would have run away, I'm afraid.
Many monks did leave Winchester.
But Ralph de Staunton decided to stay and conditions worsened.
Ralph de Staunton would have been overwhelmed trying to tend to the sick, trying to offer people advice as to what is happening, "What do I do, where has this come from?" And then the very unpleasant, physical reality on doing the nastiest job of all, which was burying their bodies.
It was January 1349.
The plague had been raging throughout the town for weeks.
Brother Ralph, according to court records, was one of those who carried the bodies of plague dead to the edge of the cathedral cemetery, close to the city centre.
Unfortunately for Ralph, the Church had lost respect for the local townspeople because of its inability to explain, let alone stop, the plague.
Where we're standing here in the middle of Winchester, was disputed land at the height of the Black Death.
We have a graveyard here, we have a marketplace about here.
Where the boundaries between those two are is a matter of dispute between the townspeople and the cathedral.
The people of the town said, "This is a market.
" The people of the Cathedral said, "This is a graveyard.
" During the Black Death, the conflict between the Church and the townspeople blew up.
The Church could not find space to bury the dead.
They decided to use an old cemetery close to the city centre.
The townspeople objected, fearing contagion if the plague dead were buried next to their market.
According to court records, in January 1349, the townspeople assaulted Ralph de Staunton, as he buried contaminated corpses.
Now, in mediaeval society, getting beaten up is a little bit more common than it is today.
Violence is to some degrees, endemic in society.
On the other hand it is still an outrage against the Bishop's authority that one of the brothers has been beaten up by the mob from the town.
The locals seized the bodies from the monk and dumped them outside the city gates in a pit for animal carcasses.
What it shows you is the breakdown of moral and social order in Winchester at the height of the Black Death.
Half of Winchester's population died of the plague.
Entire houses, streets were without inhabitants.
Why was the mortality rate in this plague so high? There are frequent outbreaks of the plague even today, but there has been nothing on the scale of the Black Death.
New DNA research may have the answer.
In 2011, scientists from Tubingen University in Germany solved one of medicine's greatest mysteries, which bacteria had caused the deadliest epidemic in history? They unearthed the skulls of medieval Plague victims.
Professor Johannes Krause works in Tubingen's Science Archaeology centre.
His team have developed a new method of testing for the DNA of the medieval Plague bacteria.
We had access to about 50 skeletons from the so-called East Smithfield collection, which is actually from a cemetery from London from the 14th century, a cemetery that was only used for victims of the Black Death.
People are thinking about it for a long time.
Why did so many people die during the medieval Plague? What made this plague, during that time, so much more lethal than later outbreaks? Professor Krause's colleague, Canadian-born Kirsten Boss, uses a new method known as DNA fishing.
In that DNA that we get from the skeletons, for example from teeth, there is a really, really tiny fraction of the actual pathogen that has caused the Black Death in the 14th century.
The best chance of extracting DNA from Plague victims who died 660 years ago is to get to the core of their teeth.
The pulverised dental material is then dissolved before it's sent off to the lab for testing.
Using the DNA of recent plague outbreaks as bait, scientists literally fish for similar DNA in the victims of the Black Death.
When the first test results came back in 2011, there was a surprise.
The DNA of the Black Death bacteria is almost identical to the DNA of the modern Plague, known as Yersinia pestis.
There have been many outbreaks of the Plague since the 14th century, yet none so deadly as the Black Death.
But the identical bacteria, which caused the Black Death, are still around today.
The ancient Plague genome was not so different from the modern plague genomes.
So it's actually, if you want, the mother of all plague which exists in the world today.
This discovery led to important conclusions.
So that suggests that the medieval Plague was actually the first time that Yersinia pestis, this plague, actually spread within the human population.
And that might actually explain why so many people died of this disease, because people were just not immune.
Later on, the survivors were more immune, and they kind of inherited, of course, their immunity to the next generation.
Modern Europeans are mostly descendants of those who survived the Black Death.
And therefore, they have a degree of immunity to the Yersinia pestis Plague bacteria.
In the 14th century, the population was still extremely vulnerable.
There was hardly any immunity or resistance against this new bacteria when it swept through Europe.
That is why the Black Death was so devastating.
In the East of England, in 1349, in the village of Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, the Cranmer family were terrified by stories of death and destruction elsewhere in the country.
'The coming of the Black Death must have been, psychologically, 'a kind of earthquake.
'People must have felt that everything they had believed,' everything they had thought to be stable about the world was now in flux.
There was a sense that the end of the world was nigh.
Terrified by the news, William Cranmer and the farmers of Walsham decided to challenge the existing order.
They refused to work for their feudal lord.
The story is told in the 660-year-old court rolls from Walsham-le-Willows, which provide a rare insight into village life during the Plague.
'To find out more, I met up with Professor John Hatcher 'from Cambridge University, 'who discovered the story of the Cranmer family.
' It's an unusual entry for Walsham, well, in fact, for England as a whole.
It's a mass protest by the tenants of the Manor, refusing to perform their custom to the lord.
And one of the tenants is William Cranmer.
People in Walsham were in no doubt that the Black Death was coming.
And they decided they didn't want to spend their last few days of the time they had left on Earth working on their lord's farm.
As winter turned to spring, the Cranmers waited to see if the Plague would spare Walsham-le-Willows.
The family's farmhouse, Cranmer Lodge, still exists.
'The house has been expanded, but the family's central room, 'with its ancient fireplace, survives to this day.
' This is Cranmer Lodge, where members of the family were born and lived and died.
In the spring of 1349, this was a scene of terrible grief.
William Cranmer was the first family member to fall ill.
There was nothing his grandchildren could do to save him.
After a few days of agony and delirium, their grandfather died.
Then his son, also called William, developed the symptoms of the Bubonic Plague.
Within days, he, too, died.
The two senior members of the Cranmer family were taken away to the cemetery of Walsham's church.
There were about 1,500 people in the parish of Walsham, and 800 of them died.
And almost all of them will have been buried here.
By the time the Plague was over, in June, 1349, two more Cranmers had died William Cranmer, the youngest, and his brother, John.
The Cranmer family had lost their last male heirs.
All men in the Cranmer family died in a period of about ten weeks.
The only ones left were the two girls, Olivia and Hilary.
For the two women, the world had been turned upside down, not just at Cranmer Lodge, but in every household in the village.
So many people had died.
As a novelist, I visualised a street in which I might be living.
And in every three houses, one house is empty because everybody died.
That's a kind of devastating thing to happen.
In many towns and villages across Europe, as much as half the population had died from the Plague by 1350.
What would become of those left behind? In the Suffolk village of Walsham-le-Willows in eastern England, the death of the four men in the Cranmer family left the two sisters, Olivia and Hilary, fending for themselves.
How would they manage on their own? Hilary and Olivia Cranmer inherited a staggering 40 acres of land from their deceased family and relatives.
As a result, they were no longer poor peasants.
They had become independent landowners.
For Olivia, in particular, this was a remarkable change of fortune.
Before the Black Death, the sisters' lives were harsh.
Women came under the complete control of the lord of the manor and the Church.
They had to work on the Lord's land and follow the rules of the Church.
The recorded story of Olivia Cranmer began in 1337, 12 years before the Black Death, when young Olivia got herself into trouble.
Well, this entry here is the first entry that names Olivia Cranmer.
It's an unusual entry and a very personal entry, it states that, "Olivia, daughter of William of Cranmer, "produced a child outside of marriage "and therefore is fined child-wight 32 pence.
" 32 pence, about a month's wages, was a huge burden for the Cranmer family.
Until the Black Death Olivia's life was ruled by these archaic laws and practices of feudal England.
The loss of life during the plague was so great that it brought about a social revolution.
Olivia and Hilary Cranmer were quick to take advantage.
So many of the Cranmer family died in the plague that the two sisters inherited a great deal of land.
But there was a problem.
Farming in the Middle Ages was very labour intensive and many of the labourers had died.
Suddenly there was a terrible shortage of workers after the Black Death.
There weren't enough people to plough the fields and reap the harvest.
The Black Death created a labour market, previously there was no such thing in Europe.
Most peasants were serfs and they had no choice.
If you were born in a village, you belonged to the lord and you had to work and stay there.
Suddenly, labourers realised that they had value, they could bargain and they could say to this guy, "That's not enough money, I'm going to work somewhere else.
" Employers started to offer people from the next village a better deal.
Earls and barons started to compete with one another.
The people never went back to their old serfdom, never completely.
In the decades after the Black Death you have increasing social tensions within England and they erupt in 1381 with the Peasants' Revolt.
And bands of armed villagers march on London, start burning the town, start talking about doing away with lordship, doing away with all the bishops, start talking about real revolution in England.
And that's the beginning of what you could call the end of any vestiges of the feudal system in England.
In the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, rural life had been transformed.
Labourers demanded more pay.
It was a problem for survivors like Hilary and Olivia Cranmer, who couldn't afford to hire workers for their farm.
How would the two sisters cope during this time of upheaval? In the English countryside, the labour shortage after the Black Death created a revolution.
It posed a problem for Olivia and Hilary Cranmer in the village of Walsham-le-Willow.
There was no way the two women could plough, sow and harvest the land they'd inherited.
They had to find another solution.
They decided to move away from arable farming into sheep rearing.
Many survivors of the Plague had inherited wealth and had money to spend, so there was an increasing demand for wool products.
The wool export trade is doing very well and Hilary and Olivia are into that at a very early stage.
A year after the Plague, Walsham court records show that the two women owned 16 cows and 120 sheep.
Their wool was in demand.
The money poured in.
They're producing wool and selling the wool.
England had a thriving export trade and the wool was prized abroad and a lot of it went off to Italy and to Florence where it would be woven into top quality cloth.
Individuals profited from the social changes following the Black Death, but the church was shaken.
The Plague absolutely devastates Winchester.
The population, which is eight or nine thousand is more than halved, and it takes a long, long time to recover.
Not decades, hundreds of years until the population gets back to the point it was before the Plague.
In Winchester, the priory where the monk Ralph de Staunton lived and worked was decimated.
The monks in the priory of St Swithun are just as devastated by the Black Death as everybody else.
The typical Benedictine monastery is supposed to have 70 brothers in it.
Well, it does before the Black Death.
Afterwards, it's reduced to about 40 and levels never manage to recover.
There's no record to show whether the monk Ralph de Staunton survived the Plague.
What is clear is that the death of so many monks across Europe reduced people's faith in the priesthood.
Why would God kill them in such numbers if they weren't the greatest sinners of them all? The power of the Church was radically undermined.
The Black Death really represents the moment when the church's authority begins to weaken.
People began to think that you didn't need the priest to talk to God.
Once you've had that idea, you then begin to think, "Well, why do I need all these authority figures? "Why do I need the earl? "Why do I need the king?" So it's a very subversive idea.
It seems simple, doesn't it? Everybody can talk to God, but it's revolution.
It was a complete change in the intellectual life of Europeans.
For the next three centuries, the Bubonic Plague came back regularly, prompting Doomsday prophecies.
These recurrences were less deadly but the epidemics were a reminder of the Church's failure.
I think it's no coincidence that in the middle of the 14th century, when you have this catastrophic plague which can't be explained and can't be counteracted by the Church, very shortly afterwards you start to see the beginning to question the Church's universal authority.
And you could say, if you wanted to pre-date the Reformation, that it all begins with this cataclysmic event, the Black Death in the 14th century.
Like the rest of Europe, Florence was devastated by the Plague, but unlike the cathedral city of Winchester, Florence was one of the long-term winners after the Black Death.
When the Plague finally came to an end, about half the population of Florence lay dead.
Many of the survivors inherited money and they spent it.
Professor Francesco Salvestrini studied how the people of Florence enjoyed their new-found wealth.
After the Plague, the city became really, really different, because the city remained empty of its population, and so there were a lot of spaces to build new buildings.
They destroyed the towers and the small houses of the Medieval town and they started the construction of the enormous, horizontal and big palaces typical of the Renaissance and the great squares like this, we are here.
We can say that the Renaissance and modern Florence is a direct consequence of the Black Death.
The Black Death was not just one of the greatest dramas in the history of the human race, but it was also a big event in the intellectual history of Europeans.
Because it undermined existing conservative hierarchies, it was also the beginning of modern medicine and modern science.
Many legacies from the victims of the Black Death benefited the Hospital Santa Maria Nuova and enabled it to expand.
Dr Francesco Guerrini survived the Plague.
He believed that successful treatment of any future Plague required an understanding of its causes.
But to investigate, he had to defy the Catholic Church, which banned the dissection of corpses.
Working secretly in the cellar, Dr Guerrini embarked on systematic research and dissected the corpses of Plague victims.
One of the rooms used for dissections has survived, including stone basins for the storage of corpses.
How did the Black Death change science and medicine? The Plague undoubtedly accelerated the development of anatomical research.
These were the first pathological investigations into dead bodies.
Despite the ban on dissections, doctors tried to find out what had caused a person's death.
Guerrini and his successors paved the way for modern medical research.
The Black Death killed at least a third, maybe half the population of Europe.
And yet, it was also the cause of a surge forward in progress.
Paradoxically, the Black Death was progressive.
The Black Death shook the foundations of society.
The survivors, women like Olivia and Hilary Cranmer, and scientists like Dr Francesco Guerrini, changed the world.
The Middle Ages came to an end and the Modern Age began.
It came to be known as the Black Death.
In two and a half years, this plague killed 25 million people.
I'm Ken Follett, author of two best-selling novels set in the Middle Ages, The Pillars Of The Earth and World Without End.
I set my novel World Without End at the time of the Black Death.
The book draws on the stories of real people and events and on the latest historical research.
I was surprised by what I found as I read of Europe descending into anarchy.
The Black Death struck me as one of the greatest dramas in the history of the human race.
It killed at least a third, maybe half the population of Europe, and yet because it undermined existing conservative hierarchies, it was also the cause of a surge forward in progress.
Paradoxically, the Black Death was progressive.
The Black Death affected almost every single person in Europe.
I was fascinated by the stories of three remarkable, brave individuals who lived through the Black Death - a doctor in Florence, Italy a monk in the cathedral town of Winchester a farm girl and her family in rural England.
I discovered through their true stories that out of the Black Death, new thinking, new science and new hope burst into life and turned the world upside down.
In the small village of Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, England, an elderly peasant farmer, William Cranmer, fell seriously ill in the spring of 1349.
It started with a headache.
A few hours later, boils erupted all over his body.
His granddaughters, Hilary and Olivia, had never seen symptoms like it.
They suspected it was the Great Pestilence, the epidemic that had ravaged much of Europe.
Within a day, William Cranmer was dead.
If it really was the plague, then Hilary and Olivia knew that nobody in the Cranmer family was safe.
The first signs of the Black Death in Europe had come a year and a half earlier, in October 1347.
A small fleet of Genoese ships returned from the Crimea.
The sailors had come into contact with an unknown sickness.
By the time the ships reached Sicily, many of the sailors were dead and dying.
The mysterious disease spread throughout Italy.
In January 1348, there were plague cases in the north, not far from the city of Florence.
Florence in the early 14th century was one of the great cities of Europe.
It was a centre of manufacturing, finance and trade, being a crucial link between the Christian world and the East.
It was a prosperous city, bustling with people - ideal conditions for the spread of a plague epidemic like the Black Death.
Florence, like the rest of Europe, had not witnessed a major epidemic in 700 years.
They had no idea what was about to hit them.
By March 1348, the Black Death was at the city gates.
The authorities believed the plague spread through foul odours in the dirty streets.
When the Florentine authorities heard of the approaching plague, they ordered the city cleared of its rubbish, but the narrow streets of medieval cities were absolutely filthy, and anyway, nothing could stop the plague.
The Santa Maria Nuova is one of the oldest hospitals in Florence.
It's still a working hospital today.
When the plague hit Florence in 1348, the wards quickly filled up with patients with strange boils, or buboes.
Their condition was described by the contemporary Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio.
"The sickness began with a swelling of the groin and armpits.
"The tumours varied in size and soon appeared all over the body.
"The disease then altered in nature, "with black or livid spots everywhere.
" These were a certain sign of impending death.
People in terrible agony, had terrible headaches.
One of the symptoms was an unquenchable thirst that was so awful that sometimes people threw themselves in rivers and drowned because they couldn't quench their thirst.
I want to tell you the story of a remarkable doctor who worked in this hospital at the time of the plague.
He became a pioneer of medical science.
Dr Francesco Guarini was both a pharmacist and a doctor, so at first he prescribed common herbal potions.
He used leeches for blood-letting, to cleanse the body of poison.
It was a common method, but it was ineffective.
Dr Guarini could not stop his patients dying.
The plague had no known cure.
He thought he had to clean the pus out of the buboes, but cleaning them greatly increased the danger of contagion.
There was little the doctors could do.
They had few instruments.
Dr Guarini knew that the plague was highly contagious, and that he was in serious danger.
The hospital's monks refused to visit the dying, but Guarini would not leave his patients.
He did what little he could to ease their pain.
The bubonic plague spread fast.
The Italian writer Boccaccio wrote "This pestilence spread from the ill to the healthy "like fire among dry wood.
"It was communicated even by touching the clothes of the sick, "or anything they had touched.
" Dr Francesco Guarini had no remedy for this deadly infection.
People didn't know about germs, but they did know that illness is passed from one person to another, cos that's obvious.
They didn't know how it passed.
Some people felt it was through the eyes.
A beam of light from the eye would pass illness to somebody you looked at.
Others thought it came from the breath, much closer to what we now understand to be the truth.
At the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, I met historian Dr Esther Diana, an expert on its long history.
The main 14th-century treatment room, where the doctors worked, has been preserved.
It's more of a chapel.
At the time, an illness was seen as a divine punishment.
First and foremost, the sick therefore had to re-establish their bond with God.
It was seen as more important to cure the soul than to cure the body.
Medical practice in the 14th century was a mixture of religious belief, ignorance and outright quackery.
Well, here's a typical medieval recipe.
Cut out a verse from the Bible, from a parchment Bible, grind it up, dissolve it in wine and drink it.
That was a classic medieval remedy, and, of course, completely useless.
The vast majority of doctors were from the priesthood, and had more interest in spiritual remedies than physical cures.
Dr Guarini was different.
Francesco Guarini was a secular doctor, not religious, and he was a pharmacist, a very important role, because most doctors of the time didn't have any training to deal with diseases.
Francesco Guarini's methods were advanced for their time but he was handicapped because no-one had discovered the origins of the disease that ravaged Florence in 1348.
Professor Johannes Krause of Tubingen University is part of a team of scientists who researched the unsolved mysteries of the Black Death.
The bubonic plague is actually a rodent disease, usually living in wild rodent populations like squirrels or marmots and from them, it can jump to domestic rodents like mice, rats.
Rat fleas feed on the blood of infected rats.
The fleas bite the rat and suck this infected blood into their stomachs.
In the blood, you have this bacteria.
It's clever, it produces a protein which clogs the stomach of the fleas.
Because the blood in its stomach has coagulated, the flea cannot digest it.
The rat flea abandons the rat and bites a nearby human.
When he bites the next time, he has to vomit all the blood from his stomach into the bite.
What happens is that the bite gets infected, it turns into these buboes, these bulbs and the infection spreads into the whole body.
So you have this bubo and from that bubo, it goes into all organs.
The organs fail, they rupture.
It goes into the blood and after usually five to ten days, you die a pretty horrible death.
Once the plague had infected a human, the disease could be passed on from person to person by coughing.
The people of Florence waited in terror for their inevitable death.
The Black Death had reached Florence.
The people of the city managed their fears in different ways.
Those who could afford it left the city, secluded themselves in the country, tried to stay away from all human contact.
But others figured eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
So, they ate everything there was to eat.
They drank everything there was to drink.
And they had amazing sex orgies in which they just had sex with anybody they wanted to.
The writer, Boccaccio, described what happened.
"Some believed that drinking, going about singing and having fun, "satisfying all their appetites as much as they could, "was sure medicine for any illness.
"They spent day and night drinking without a mode or measure, "engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure.
"And they combined this bestial behaviour with as complete "and avoidance of the sick as they could manage.
" Within weeks, tens of thousands were dead.
Whole families were wiped out.
The cemeteries filled up, and still there was no end in sight.
The plague devastated Italy.
It moved along the Mediterranean coast and into northern France.
And across the English Channel, in southern England, people braced themselves.
Winchester was one of Medieval England's richest cities, with a large population of 10,000.
It lies just 20 miles inland.
Winchester inspired the fictitious city of Kingsbridge in my novel, World Without End.
Historian, Dan Jones, is an expert on 14th century England.
He has investigated the dramatic history of Winchester at the time of the Black Death.
People in Winchester would have known for months probably, that the plague was coming, it was spreading through Europe and it was killing vast numbers of people.
Mediaeval Winchester was dominated by its magnificent cathedral and the almighty Catholic Church, which taught that it was the only link between humans and the divine.
Priests looked for an explanation for the approaching epidemic.
There's a massive problem explaining where the plague has come from.
Psychologically, the plague is really hard for people to deal with and there's only one way to interpret it to the mediaeval mind, which is that this is a punishment from God for the sins of man.
But the question the church in Winchester had to answer was what terrible sin would merit such horrific punishment? The priesthood found its authority under attack.
The Church always explained illness as some kind of punishment.
An epidemic illness was explained as a punishment for epidemic sins.
When the Black Death first reached England in the late summer of 1348, people of Winchester looked to their bishop to protect them.
The Bishop was William Edington, buried here in the Cathedral.
But what would he do? The Bishop writes to the people of Winchester saying, "God's clearly very angry, we'd better make him happy.
" And he orders them to hold a procession through town to show their sorrow, their penance, their devotion to God in the hope that the plague would spare the people from the monastery, people from the church and the townsmen.
Bishop Edington proclaimed that a weekly procession was the best hope.
One of the clerics in the procession was brother Ralph de Staunton a monk documented in local records.
Before the plague, being a monk like Ralph de Staunton was probably a pretty good job.
You know, you have a place to live, good structure to your life, you're fed every day, live in pretty good conditions.
You're reasonably well respected by the people of the town.
In return, monks like Ralph, looked after people when they were ill.
They also helped people have a good death.
They come in helping people to physically die, making sure they were as comfortable as possible in an age without anaesthetic.
But it can also mean in the spiritual aspect, so taking confession from people, giving people advice of how to live a more godly life so that when their time comes to pass from Earth to heaven, or purgatory or the other place, then they are spiritually prepared for that.
Amen.
Death haunted the mediaeval imagination.
In the mediaeval mind, life on Earth was just the beginning of the spiritual journey to God.
The Church increasingly controlled how people die.
It can shorten your time in purgatory before you were sent to heaven.
That makes it a very powerful force on Earth.
So when the bishop ordered the processions to continue, the people obeyed, even when he retreated to his house in the country, well away from Winchester.
Having a procession through town, you know, would not seem like a very good idea now if the Black Death was coming.
What we'd do is isolate everybody.
Keep the sick people away from one another.
So, you could probably say having a procession through the middle of Winchester at the inception of this awful outbreak of plague, is one of the worst things you could do.
Ralph de Staunton, like everyone else in Winchester, had heard the terrifying reports of the approaching plague.
He could only do as his bishop told him and put his trust in the mercy of God.
At Christmas, 1348, the Black Death reached Winchester.
Imagine the streets of Winchester being full of people with the horrible signs of plague sickness.
The buboes in their skin, the horrible smell that emitted from your pores when you are sick with this.
There would have been no escaping the signs of the plague everywhere.
Ralph de Staunton had the most dangerous job in the world.
The faithful monk came into contact with sick people all the time, tending them to try to give them some semblance of a good death and ease them as best he could through their final hours.
There was a piece of advice given to priests who are hearing confession.
When the dying man is confessing and he wants to whisper don't lean forward like this.
Because the closer the priest leaned to the dying man, the more likely he was to catch the plague.
Ralph, and all the monks and priests of Winchester feared the plague.
They had a difficult choice, stick to their duty in the town or ignore the Bishop's instructions and run away and hide in the forest.
Of course, they knew their duty was to stay.
And almost none of them did.
If they have the chance to go, they went.
And I wish I was a hero, but I'm not.
I write about heroes and I think I would have been as weak as them and I would have run away, I'm afraid.
Many monks did leave Winchester.
But Ralph de Staunton decided to stay and conditions worsened.
Ralph de Staunton would have been overwhelmed trying to tend to the sick, trying to offer people advice as to what is happening, "What do I do, where has this come from?" And then the very unpleasant, physical reality on doing the nastiest job of all, which was burying their bodies.
It was January 1349.
The plague had been raging throughout the town for weeks.
Brother Ralph, according to court records, was one of those who carried the bodies of plague dead to the edge of the cathedral cemetery, close to the city centre.
Unfortunately for Ralph, the Church had lost respect for the local townspeople because of its inability to explain, let alone stop, the plague.
Where we're standing here in the middle of Winchester, was disputed land at the height of the Black Death.
We have a graveyard here, we have a marketplace about here.
Where the boundaries between those two are is a matter of dispute between the townspeople and the cathedral.
The people of the town said, "This is a market.
" The people of the Cathedral said, "This is a graveyard.
" During the Black Death, the conflict between the Church and the townspeople blew up.
The Church could not find space to bury the dead.
They decided to use an old cemetery close to the city centre.
The townspeople objected, fearing contagion if the plague dead were buried next to their market.
According to court records, in January 1349, the townspeople assaulted Ralph de Staunton, as he buried contaminated corpses.
Now, in mediaeval society, getting beaten up is a little bit more common than it is today.
Violence is to some degrees, endemic in society.
On the other hand it is still an outrage against the Bishop's authority that one of the brothers has been beaten up by the mob from the town.
The locals seized the bodies from the monk and dumped them outside the city gates in a pit for animal carcasses.
What it shows you is the breakdown of moral and social order in Winchester at the height of the Black Death.
Half of Winchester's population died of the plague.
Entire houses, streets were without inhabitants.
Why was the mortality rate in this plague so high? There are frequent outbreaks of the plague even today, but there has been nothing on the scale of the Black Death.
New DNA research may have the answer.
In 2011, scientists from Tubingen University in Germany solved one of medicine's greatest mysteries, which bacteria had caused the deadliest epidemic in history? They unearthed the skulls of medieval Plague victims.
Professor Johannes Krause works in Tubingen's Science Archaeology centre.
His team have developed a new method of testing for the DNA of the medieval Plague bacteria.
We had access to about 50 skeletons from the so-called East Smithfield collection, which is actually from a cemetery from London from the 14th century, a cemetery that was only used for victims of the Black Death.
People are thinking about it for a long time.
Why did so many people die during the medieval Plague? What made this plague, during that time, so much more lethal than later outbreaks? Professor Krause's colleague, Canadian-born Kirsten Boss, uses a new method known as DNA fishing.
In that DNA that we get from the skeletons, for example from teeth, there is a really, really tiny fraction of the actual pathogen that has caused the Black Death in the 14th century.
The best chance of extracting DNA from Plague victims who died 660 years ago is to get to the core of their teeth.
The pulverised dental material is then dissolved before it's sent off to the lab for testing.
Using the DNA of recent plague outbreaks as bait, scientists literally fish for similar DNA in the victims of the Black Death.
When the first test results came back in 2011, there was a surprise.
The DNA of the Black Death bacteria is almost identical to the DNA of the modern Plague, known as Yersinia pestis.
There have been many outbreaks of the Plague since the 14th century, yet none so deadly as the Black Death.
But the identical bacteria, which caused the Black Death, are still around today.
The ancient Plague genome was not so different from the modern plague genomes.
So it's actually, if you want, the mother of all plague which exists in the world today.
This discovery led to important conclusions.
So that suggests that the medieval Plague was actually the first time that Yersinia pestis, this plague, actually spread within the human population.
And that might actually explain why so many people died of this disease, because people were just not immune.
Later on, the survivors were more immune, and they kind of inherited, of course, their immunity to the next generation.
Modern Europeans are mostly descendants of those who survived the Black Death.
And therefore, they have a degree of immunity to the Yersinia pestis Plague bacteria.
In the 14th century, the population was still extremely vulnerable.
There was hardly any immunity or resistance against this new bacteria when it swept through Europe.
That is why the Black Death was so devastating.
In the East of England, in 1349, in the village of Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, the Cranmer family were terrified by stories of death and destruction elsewhere in the country.
'The coming of the Black Death must have been, psychologically, 'a kind of earthquake.
'People must have felt that everything they had believed,' everything they had thought to be stable about the world was now in flux.
There was a sense that the end of the world was nigh.
Terrified by the news, William Cranmer and the farmers of Walsham decided to challenge the existing order.
They refused to work for their feudal lord.
The story is told in the 660-year-old court rolls from Walsham-le-Willows, which provide a rare insight into village life during the Plague.
'To find out more, I met up with Professor John Hatcher 'from Cambridge University, 'who discovered the story of the Cranmer family.
' It's an unusual entry for Walsham, well, in fact, for England as a whole.
It's a mass protest by the tenants of the Manor, refusing to perform their custom to the lord.
And one of the tenants is William Cranmer.
People in Walsham were in no doubt that the Black Death was coming.
And they decided they didn't want to spend their last few days of the time they had left on Earth working on their lord's farm.
As winter turned to spring, the Cranmers waited to see if the Plague would spare Walsham-le-Willows.
The family's farmhouse, Cranmer Lodge, still exists.
'The house has been expanded, but the family's central room, 'with its ancient fireplace, survives to this day.
' This is Cranmer Lodge, where members of the family were born and lived and died.
In the spring of 1349, this was a scene of terrible grief.
William Cranmer was the first family member to fall ill.
There was nothing his grandchildren could do to save him.
After a few days of agony and delirium, their grandfather died.
Then his son, also called William, developed the symptoms of the Bubonic Plague.
Within days, he, too, died.
The two senior members of the Cranmer family were taken away to the cemetery of Walsham's church.
There were about 1,500 people in the parish of Walsham, and 800 of them died.
And almost all of them will have been buried here.
By the time the Plague was over, in June, 1349, two more Cranmers had died William Cranmer, the youngest, and his brother, John.
The Cranmer family had lost their last male heirs.
All men in the Cranmer family died in a period of about ten weeks.
The only ones left were the two girls, Olivia and Hilary.
For the two women, the world had been turned upside down, not just at Cranmer Lodge, but in every household in the village.
So many people had died.
As a novelist, I visualised a street in which I might be living.
And in every three houses, one house is empty because everybody died.
That's a kind of devastating thing to happen.
In many towns and villages across Europe, as much as half the population had died from the Plague by 1350.
What would become of those left behind? In the Suffolk village of Walsham-le-Willows in eastern England, the death of the four men in the Cranmer family left the two sisters, Olivia and Hilary, fending for themselves.
How would they manage on their own? Hilary and Olivia Cranmer inherited a staggering 40 acres of land from their deceased family and relatives.
As a result, they were no longer poor peasants.
They had become independent landowners.
For Olivia, in particular, this was a remarkable change of fortune.
Before the Black Death, the sisters' lives were harsh.
Women came under the complete control of the lord of the manor and the Church.
They had to work on the Lord's land and follow the rules of the Church.
The recorded story of Olivia Cranmer began in 1337, 12 years before the Black Death, when young Olivia got herself into trouble.
Well, this entry here is the first entry that names Olivia Cranmer.
It's an unusual entry and a very personal entry, it states that, "Olivia, daughter of William of Cranmer, "produced a child outside of marriage "and therefore is fined child-wight 32 pence.
" 32 pence, about a month's wages, was a huge burden for the Cranmer family.
Until the Black Death Olivia's life was ruled by these archaic laws and practices of feudal England.
The loss of life during the plague was so great that it brought about a social revolution.
Olivia and Hilary Cranmer were quick to take advantage.
So many of the Cranmer family died in the plague that the two sisters inherited a great deal of land.
But there was a problem.
Farming in the Middle Ages was very labour intensive and many of the labourers had died.
Suddenly there was a terrible shortage of workers after the Black Death.
There weren't enough people to plough the fields and reap the harvest.
The Black Death created a labour market, previously there was no such thing in Europe.
Most peasants were serfs and they had no choice.
If you were born in a village, you belonged to the lord and you had to work and stay there.
Suddenly, labourers realised that they had value, they could bargain and they could say to this guy, "That's not enough money, I'm going to work somewhere else.
" Employers started to offer people from the next village a better deal.
Earls and barons started to compete with one another.
The people never went back to their old serfdom, never completely.
In the decades after the Black Death you have increasing social tensions within England and they erupt in 1381 with the Peasants' Revolt.
And bands of armed villagers march on London, start burning the town, start talking about doing away with lordship, doing away with all the bishops, start talking about real revolution in England.
And that's the beginning of what you could call the end of any vestiges of the feudal system in England.
In the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, rural life had been transformed.
Labourers demanded more pay.
It was a problem for survivors like Hilary and Olivia Cranmer, who couldn't afford to hire workers for their farm.
How would the two sisters cope during this time of upheaval? In the English countryside, the labour shortage after the Black Death created a revolution.
It posed a problem for Olivia and Hilary Cranmer in the village of Walsham-le-Willow.
There was no way the two women could plough, sow and harvest the land they'd inherited.
They had to find another solution.
They decided to move away from arable farming into sheep rearing.
Many survivors of the Plague had inherited wealth and had money to spend, so there was an increasing demand for wool products.
The wool export trade is doing very well and Hilary and Olivia are into that at a very early stage.
A year after the Plague, Walsham court records show that the two women owned 16 cows and 120 sheep.
Their wool was in demand.
The money poured in.
They're producing wool and selling the wool.
England had a thriving export trade and the wool was prized abroad and a lot of it went off to Italy and to Florence where it would be woven into top quality cloth.
Individuals profited from the social changes following the Black Death, but the church was shaken.
The Plague absolutely devastates Winchester.
The population, which is eight or nine thousand is more than halved, and it takes a long, long time to recover.
Not decades, hundreds of years until the population gets back to the point it was before the Plague.
In Winchester, the priory where the monk Ralph de Staunton lived and worked was decimated.
The monks in the priory of St Swithun are just as devastated by the Black Death as everybody else.
The typical Benedictine monastery is supposed to have 70 brothers in it.
Well, it does before the Black Death.
Afterwards, it's reduced to about 40 and levels never manage to recover.
There's no record to show whether the monk Ralph de Staunton survived the Plague.
What is clear is that the death of so many monks across Europe reduced people's faith in the priesthood.
Why would God kill them in such numbers if they weren't the greatest sinners of them all? The power of the Church was radically undermined.
The Black Death really represents the moment when the church's authority begins to weaken.
People began to think that you didn't need the priest to talk to God.
Once you've had that idea, you then begin to think, "Well, why do I need all these authority figures? "Why do I need the earl? "Why do I need the king?" So it's a very subversive idea.
It seems simple, doesn't it? Everybody can talk to God, but it's revolution.
It was a complete change in the intellectual life of Europeans.
For the next three centuries, the Bubonic Plague came back regularly, prompting Doomsday prophecies.
These recurrences were less deadly but the epidemics were a reminder of the Church's failure.
I think it's no coincidence that in the middle of the 14th century, when you have this catastrophic plague which can't be explained and can't be counteracted by the Church, very shortly afterwards you start to see the beginning to question the Church's universal authority.
And you could say, if you wanted to pre-date the Reformation, that it all begins with this cataclysmic event, the Black Death in the 14th century.
Like the rest of Europe, Florence was devastated by the Plague, but unlike the cathedral city of Winchester, Florence was one of the long-term winners after the Black Death.
When the Plague finally came to an end, about half the population of Florence lay dead.
Many of the survivors inherited money and they spent it.
Professor Francesco Salvestrini studied how the people of Florence enjoyed their new-found wealth.
After the Plague, the city became really, really different, because the city remained empty of its population, and so there were a lot of spaces to build new buildings.
They destroyed the towers and the small houses of the Medieval town and they started the construction of the enormous, horizontal and big palaces typical of the Renaissance and the great squares like this, we are here.
We can say that the Renaissance and modern Florence is a direct consequence of the Black Death.
The Black Death was not just one of the greatest dramas in the history of the human race, but it was also a big event in the intellectual history of Europeans.
Because it undermined existing conservative hierarchies, it was also the beginning of modern medicine and modern science.
Many legacies from the victims of the Black Death benefited the Hospital Santa Maria Nuova and enabled it to expand.
Dr Francesco Guerrini survived the Plague.
He believed that successful treatment of any future Plague required an understanding of its causes.
But to investigate, he had to defy the Catholic Church, which banned the dissection of corpses.
Working secretly in the cellar, Dr Guerrini embarked on systematic research and dissected the corpses of Plague victims.
One of the rooms used for dissections has survived, including stone basins for the storage of corpses.
How did the Black Death change science and medicine? The Plague undoubtedly accelerated the development of anatomical research.
These were the first pathological investigations into dead bodies.
Despite the ban on dissections, doctors tried to find out what had caused a person's death.
Guerrini and his successors paved the way for modern medical research.
The Black Death killed at least a third, maybe half the population of Europe.
And yet, it was also the cause of a surge forward in progress.
Paradoxically, the Black Death was progressive.
The Black Death shook the foundations of society.
The survivors, women like Olivia and Hilary Cranmer, and scientists like Dr Francesco Guerrini, changed the world.
The Middle Ages came to an end and the Modern Age began.