School Stuff

Black Death

I wrote this for CC (Creative Curriculum) hen I was in yr 7. I can't believe how lazy I was in yr 7, not that I'm not lazy now but not as lazy as I used to be.

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Black Death was two types of plague. One affected people’s lungs and gave them pneumonia; it was spread by germs being passed from one being to another. The other type was most deadly; it was called bubonic plague because it caused buboes to appear on peoples bodies mostly under the armpit.

At first the dead were buried properly in wooden coffins soon enough many had died and new cemeteries had to be made outside city walls where the dead were buried in monstrous pits. In the country side some villages ceased to exist all their inhabitants died, other villages has no one to harvest the crop or to look after the animals. Boundless amounts of priests died and monasteries were affected even more due to the monks living so close together and because of this London’s population dropped from 70,000 to 40,000 in two years, this was a short term thing because the people of London had children and the population went back up.

Most villages were empty, they were deserted, things were rotting, it was just filthy “In the north, when the time came for all tenants to pay their rents to the Bishop of Dirham, no one turned up from West Thickley, they were all dead” and West Thickley was deserted .

For those who survived there were benefits, there was extra land to be claimed now the owners had died, some villeins managed to become freemen because of this other villeins simply refused to work for nothing, labourers  began to change more for their service ,the land owners had little choice but to pay the extra wages as there was no one else to hire “In Autumn 1350 a reaper  would work no less than 8d a day, with free food and a mower charged 12d a day with food there were so few workers that in many fields the crops rotted.” This was said by Henry Knighton. In 1351 Parliament was forced to pass a law called the statute Labourers. This said that wages had to stay at the level they were before the invasion of the Black Death and that labourers could not move from one area to another. Some people just ignored it; people who had survived the Black Death were not frightened by Parliament. This was a long term effect because we are not peasants anymore.

Store owners had to lower their prices or nobody would buy from them “Suddenly everything became very cheap, because no one was bothered about money or goods they were all frightened of dying. A horse that had once been worth £2 before the plague was now worth 7 shillings you could buy a cow for 12 pence and even a sheep for three pence.” This was said by Henry Knighton.

People gave different opinions to what caused the plague a French doctor said “Instant death occurs when the spirit escaping from the eyes of a sick being strikes the eyes of a healthy being looking at the sick one especially when the sick is in agony.” An Archbishop said “This great pestilence is caused by the sins of men, who have forgotten the generosity of God.” Not only was the infection passed on by speech or meeting with the sick, but any that touched their clothes or anything else that was in contact with them seemed to get the disease” this quote was quite true because getting in contact with anything that has black death would most likely cause you to take hold of the disease.

The Black Death continued for about 2 years for now it hasn’t been heard of recently but in many different countries Black death can still be caught ,fortunately the doctors now have a cure.