King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England

Concern about the spread of AIDS in countries where no medical intervention appears possible may be one explanation for the recent appearance of books addressing the consequences of the bubonic and pneumonic plague that swept through Europe in the mid-fourteenth century and returned intermittently over the next 350 years. Two of these books are new appearances of landmark studies: William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976; rpt. with rev. preface, 1998), and a new translation of Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996). Platt’s less important book supplements these with its clear presentation of the economic and social impact of depopulation consequent to the plague in a single country.

Of particular value in this book are the first three chapters on the mortality of the Black Death and its consequences for cities and villages, as well as chapter 8, “Protest and Resolution.” Survivors of the 1348–49 pandemic were predominantly young adults, but six more waves of the disease before the end of the fourteenth century killed many offspring of these survivors, and the century ended with a mostly aged population. As a result, the period 1400–1500 was characterized by zero population growth of a populace at 50 percent of the pre-1348 level. The consequences of underpopulation for English cities and country life are well handled in the initial chapters, and chapter 8 deals with labor scarcity, the Peasant’s Revolt, and the gradual disappearance in the following century of almost all features of bondman status.

Platt’s arguments in chapters 4–7—on the nobility, gentry, and monastic and clerical life—are less convincing than the earlier chapters because phenomena such as the decline of noble families, the rise of gentry, and changes in monastic practices almost certainly had causes in addition to depopulation, not least because they appear in some instances to have been peculiar to England. Chapter 9, “Architecture and the Arts,” also attributes much to the Black Death that may have had other causes, although the postplague appearance of such funerary monuments as shroud brasses and cadaver effigies bears emphasis.

This general introduction to economic and social results of the plague in late-medieval England does not represent primary research. The book is, however, a skilled synthesis of the important scholarship of historians like Barbara Harvey, John Hatcher, and Richard Smith, and it concludes with a rich bibliography. Certain features (which scholars may find frustrating) indicate that the volume is intended for a popular audience. For one, primary sources are almost always cited indirectly, by citation to other secondary studies. Further, the densely illustrated volume draws heavily on picture libraries such as the iconographic database at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (cited by Platt as “The Wellcome Centre Medical Photographic Library”) and provides no documentation beyond picture library citation. Anyone wanting to know about the text accompanying a woodcut in “a late-fifteenth-century Nuremberg treatise on bubonic plague” (illus. 1, p. 2) will not find the information in this book. Finally, the general and perhaps ephemeral nature of this volume is reflected in its colloquial style, with locutions such as “Mickey Mouse numbers” (p. 5), “a one-off sale of plate” (p. 8), and “the fire-sale of the Dissolution” (p. 190).

Platt’s breezy style leads him not only to discard a historian’s register, but also to voice strongly held opinions that may perplex the reader. He expresses distress over the improvement in the financial welfare of widows during the period under discussion, and he faults women for outliving their husbands by many years, a situation most of us see as resulting not from perversity but from marriage-age conventions. Platt uses many waspish turns of phrase such as “rich old ladies . . . have brought misery to every generation” (p. 58), “the crime of the rich old ladies . . . was not...