The Black Death (or the fear of it) killed 50% of the population (or perhaps no one died at all)

Another made up disease and unreliable mathematical model

The ‘Black Death’ or the dreaded ‘Plague’, which supposedly occurred between 1347 and 1351, is said to have killed half the population of England, though unfortunately no one knows how large the population was to begin with.

Wikipedia says that ‘researchers are hampered by the lack of reliable statistics from this period. Most work has been done on the spread of the disease in England, and even estimates of overall population at the start vary by over 100% as no census was undertaken in England between the time of publication of the Domesday Book of 1086 and the poll tax of the year 1377.’ In other words no one knows what percentage of people died as nobody knows how many people were alive to start with.

‘Estimates of plague victims are usually extrapolated from figures for the clergy.’ The figures used are for vacancies in the clergy, historians admit it is very difficult to determine the cause of the vacancy. The vacancies are said to have gone from about 30/1000 before 1347 to about 400/1000. From Hatcher; ‘in plague years the number of resignations rose sharply.’ Therefore, deaths are difficult to distinguish from resignation or transfer, and maybe many clergy just ran away from the the perceived danger of their duties.

The number of deaths between 1347 and 1351 may be an inaccurate extrapolation from the vacancies seen in the clergy. The apparent prior doubling of the population between 1086 and 1347, followed by the subsequent halving in the ‘plague’ years, may not have happened at all.

Perhaps the population didn’t rise at all from 1086 and only started to rise in the 1600s? Perhaps the increase prior to the 1377 census, shown in the graph above, was only added to accommodate the subsequent decrease of between 30-50% caused by widely inaccurate extrapolation from vacancies in the clergy as being deaths from a ‘plague’?

A rise in skilled workers wages at this time is said to be another indication of a mass death event. Again from Hatcher 'The Black Death had few of the debilitating effects the one has been led to associate with population decline of the later Middle Ages’. The term ‘economic growth’ he says can justifiably be applied to the later 14th century’ and ‘any setbacks in production’ caused by 50% of the population dying were ‘short-lived’ and none of the things that happened in the later 14th century are ‘commensurate with a population decline of around 35-50%’! Instead of accepting that the premise is false, Hatcher and other historians continue to accept the ‘dilemma’ that the facts don’t support a mass die off of the population.

Hatcher emphasises that economic fluctuations can only give us the ‘vaguest of hints’ as to what was happening at the time. Yet he claims a significant rise in wages compared to the price of grain indicates greater demand for labour, greater per capita production and previous over-population and farming of poor soils.

The misleading and truncated graph below does not show workers suddenly being given more money due to being in demand, they are real wages, meaning wages compared to the price of wheat. Real wages indicate standard of living which was rising before the alleged catastrophic mass die off and continued to increase slightly afterwards. It also indicates that the price of grain may have been low, perhaps caused by increased production from favourable changes in the climate.

A less truncated and therefore less misleading graph of population and real wages is shown here. Real wages hardly changed at all until the 1900s, even though the population had dramatically increased from the 1600s, real wages didn’t decrease.

Studies on cereal grain pollen show that agriculture change was heterogeneous across Europe at the time with many areas not only being completely unaffected by the alleged Black Death but actually flourishing and increasing, as shown in green in below.

Some critics of this paper say that the decrease in grain production shown in some areas, in pink, may have had other causes, such as migration and have nothing to do with a ‘plague’ at all.

The data on wages and wheat prices in the 1300s is scanty, not formally collected, and comes from different sources at different time periods and as we have seen the situation in the UK and Europe was heterogenous. Like the clergy and a few manorial records being used to extrapolate a mass death I have no confidence in the alleged real wages indicating one either.

Barney Sloane argues that there’s evidence from wills and tax records that 50% of Londoners died, though people may have been making wills in fear of dying or were leaving London and therefore not paying their taxes- the rich certainly scarpered to their country piles. And again no one knows how many lived in London to start with. Most of the population did not live in London and there was a lot of migration, so extrapolating from London to the countryside as a whole is also dangerous.

Thus the evidence for mass deaths in the middle of the 14th century seems to be limited, to say the least. In Sweden mass death is only indicated by double or triple graves. Maybe it was just lack of consecrated ground in cemeteries, perhaps because clergy had run away from their duties, which lead to multiple graves? The Swedish records at the time show that cities and towns, which were allegedly the most affected, were well ordered and clean with no evidence of over-crowding nor insanitary conditions.

The continued economic growth, high real wages, high standards of living, the increases in grain production in many areas and the fluidity of migratory agricultural work not only do not support over-population nor people being forced to farm poor soil; they strongly indicate, by historians own Malthusian theory of high real wages indicating low population, that the population had not previously doubled since the last census in 1086 and that the doubling was only proposed in order to accommodate the alleged Black Death halving.

Moving on from deaths to the disease itself. From wiki ‘Contemporary accounts of the pandemic are varied and often imprecise.’ In other words they must all be taken with a large pinch of historical salt. The symptoms of the Black Death are ‘fever, headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise.’ These symptoms could have been caused by detoxification from just about anything including external toxins or internal products of fear and stress. There are theories of volcanoes (there was volcanic activity recorded in 1348), meteorites and radiation killing people and animals.

The symptoms of fever and inflammation use temperature and sweating to expel toxins, causing headaches and painful aching joints. Buboes, pustules, boils, spots, nausea and vomiting expel toxins directly through skin and mouth. Lymph nodes swell, macrophages and the cells of homeostasis are activated to heal the body. Importantly the stimuli of tiredness and malaise cause the body rest and allow it to recover.

Many believe that the Black Death or the Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis spread by fleas (why didn’t the infected fleas die?) supposedly carried by black rats (why didn’t the rats die?). However ‘Archeologist Barney Sloane has argued that there is insufficient evidence of the extinction of numerous rats in the archaeological record of the medieval waterfront in London and that the disease spread too quickly to support the thesis that Y. pestis was spread from fleas on rats’. Sloane argues that transmission must have been person to person. Some suggest it was transmitted by human fleas.

If there was indeed such a rapid spread it is more likely to be have been caused by toxins in the environment or a state of panic and fear. If there was an infectious plague how did it die out again so quickly in 1351; there was no effective treatment and no antibiotics? How come people suddenly became immune to the bacteria in 1351, did it mutate to harmlessness very quickly? Did fleas stop being infected or did they stop biting people? Or did rats or humans stop carrying fleas or did the fleas go away?

The evidence for the transmission via fleas and rats is very embarrassing. Researchers apparently crushed up fleas and injected them into rats, without doing controls, and noticed that some rats became ill. Injecting any biological material under the skin (not a normal route of transmission) is likely to make any animal show symptoms. They then put two rats in separate cages, added some fleas and noted that bacteria could be cultured from the ‘uninfected’ rat, though they didn’t show any symptoms. Another experiment using cat fleas and two rats and two mice showed after exposure to injected animals bacteria could be cultured from one rat and one mouse (again without symptoms) but not from the other two.

They should (actually they shouldn’t have been doing abusive experiments on animals at all) have used controls with rats injected with crushed insects without pestis bacteria in their stomachs. Being able to culture a bacteria (not shown to cause a disease, though possibly associated with the healing process) from animals kept in abnormal and stressful laboratory conditions in cages without doing any controls with no exposure to fleas in the cage, does not indicate an ‘infection’ nor transmission of ‘infection’ by fleas. Even if bacteria is transferred by flea bites this does not show transmission of disease.

In 1894, the Swiss physician Alexandre Yersin, a student of Louis Pasteur, examined plague victims in Hong Kong. Under the microscope he is said to have found masses of bacteria. He asserted that these bacteria had caused the Great Plague and named the bacterium Yersinia pestis. One of Yersin’s students claimed that he had found the Yersinia pestis bacillus in the stomach of rat fleas. He argued that the flea bite had injected the people with the bacteria.

Quoting again from Wikidpedia; ‘Y. pestis was discovered (grown in culture) by Alexandre Yersin, a pupil of Louis Pasteur (a known fraudster), during an epidemic of bubonic plague in Hong Kong in 1894.’ This ‘third epidemic’ had begun in Yunnan in the 1850s though the health of the Chinese people may have already been adversely affected by drug addiction due to the opium trade which had began in 1840. Indians in the British Raj, who were also allegedly affected by the epidemic at that time, are seen here being injected by Europeans with goodness knows what causing goodness knows what symptoms.

‘Yersin also proved this bacillus was present in rodents and suggested the rat was the main vehicle of transmission’. Yersin found a new bacteria in some sick people, though it may also be in healthy people (no controls were done), as well as in the stomach of some dead rats. Even if Y. pestis is correlated with symptoms of the ‘plague’ it has not been shown to be causative of them.

What have modern molecular biological techniques revealed? From wiki; ‘Definitive confirmation of the role of Y. pestis arrived in 2010 with a publication in PLOS Pathogens by Haensch et al. They assessed the presence of DNA/RNA with PCR techniques for Y. pestis from the tooth sockets in human skeletons from mass graves in northern, central and southern Europe that were associated archaeologically with the Black Death and subsequent resurgences. The authors concluded that this new research, together with prior analyses from the south of France and Germany, "ends the debate about the cause of the Black Death, and unambiguously demonstrates that Y. pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages.”’!

Oh dear. The researchers found genetic fragments, never shown to be causative of disease, in 10/72 samples using PCR and in half (24/47 samples) using positive antigen dipstick from teeth or bones of people in graves associated with the Black Death and none in 28 samples from graves of people who had died before or after it (about 1000 years before for 8 of them and about 200 years after the Black Death for 20 of them). None of the samples from Germany or Italy (26 of the 47) yielded PCR results so antigen test was used. If this dipstick method is anything like the ‘HIV’ protein test which cross reacts with pregnancy, TB, lymphadenopathy and cancer; it will not be specific for ‘plague’.

One thing is for sure; it doesn’t show that sequences, that may or may not be specific to a particular bacteria (only 1% of bacteria associated with the human microbiome have been cultured so these sequences may also be part of other bacteria), that were present in between one seventh and one half of the samples from cadavers at the time, indicates what caused the Black Death. If there was one.

Update from May 2023 from the BBC; ‘Researchers have found 4,000-year-old plague DNA in Britain - the oldest evidence of the disease in the country’. In other words they found some sequences of bacteria in bones outside of known ‘plague’ time. Instead of reasoning that the sequences are therefore non-specific for ‘plague’, they reason that ‘plaque’ was present.

‘Scientists identified three cases of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria (never shown) to be causing the plague, in human remains - two in a mass burial in Somerset, and one in a ring cairn monument in Cumbria.’

‘The team took small skeletal samples from 34 individuals looking for the presence of Yersinia pestis in teeth in 3 out of 34. The dental pulp was examined as it traps the DNA of infectious diseases.’ Or it just traps bacteria which may be present for many reasons; bacteria are involved in many homeostatic mechanisms within the body.

According to the German New medicine; ‘In March 2014, after the excavation of a mass grave in London with plague victims of the 14th century, researchers analyzed the teeth of some of the skeletons. The teeth contained indeed the DNA from the bacterium Yersinia pestis (termed “Yersinia pseudotuberculosis”). However, this DNA analysis revealed that “the Black Death was not bubonic plague, as has been thought, but pneumonic plague.” (Health and Medicine, March 31, 2014). This confirms that the Great Plague was, in reality, an epidemic of death-fright conflicts (triggered by the fear of the “deadly disease”) that had seized the European population.’

‘Symptoms of the Bubonic Plague: dark, purple swellings with the characteristic foul-smelling discharge indicating a skin tuberculosis, linked to a “feeling soiled”-conflict and the panic of contracting an “infectious disease”. Symptoms of the Pneumonic Plague: a cough with bloody sputum and hemorrhaging of the lungs indicating a lung tuberculosis, linked to a death-fright conflict (fear of the “deadly plague”). The 2014 London study showed that 95% of the people died of the pneumonic plague’

The 2010 PLOS study found that the samples associated with Black Death graves were between 14% and 50% more likely to test positive for Yersinia pseudotuberculosis than samples outside epidemics. This fits with concept that during the so-called Black Death people were terrified, ostracised, starved, abandon and locked up and therefore developed a tuberculosis like illness. The mycobacterium tuberculosis bacillus itself doesn’t cause TB. In our time it is exclusively associated with poor nutrition, drug abuse and sleeping rough. The TB bacteria associated with the symptoms proliferate and help, not hinder, the healing process by consuming dead cells among other things. Antibiotics may ‘save lives’ in people in extremis, though bacteria have not caused the life threatening conditions in the first place.

Could the measures have therefore caused the symptoms and deaths? Black Death ‘cures’ involved bloodletting, lancing, rubbing toads and applying leeches to swellings. Sicilian physician Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia was the state-appointed physician in charge of public health during the 1575 plague, the Fauci of his time.

‘The word "quarantine" has its roots in this period, though the concept of isolating people to prevent the spread of disease is older. The isolation period was later extended to forty days, and given the name "quarantino" from the Italian word for "forty”’. The measures involved abandoning, isolating, locking-up and starving those people, and sometimes whole villages, thought to have the pestilence. It’s entirely possible that being thought to have the disease, which had varied, common and non-specific symptoms, was a death sentence in itself. ‘Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died.’

‘Some Europeans targeted "various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims", lepers, and Romani, blaming them for the crisis. Lepers, and others with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were killed throughout Europe.’

People were even afraid to bury the dead; ‘And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.’ This explains why families ended up burying their own dead in double our triple family graves; it was not because grave yards were full to overflowing.

Fear, hysteria and politics should never be underestimated, nor the difficulty of distinguishing ‘leprosy’, ‘smallpox’ or ‘plague’ in art.

Following this alleged time of illness ‘it has been speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art.’

Another interpretation is that the church used this period of fear, that did not necessarily led to mass deaths, to commission art and propaganda to show people what happens to them if they don’t obey the rules.

Perhaps, like Covid (there was no spike in excess deaths compared to the years before 2008), there was no plague, no Black Deaths and absolutely nothing to see here.

To misquote Winston Churchill, Edna St. Vincent Milay, Arnold Toynbee, or any one of a half-dozen other candidates; ‘History is just one damned spin after another.’

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The Black Death wikipedia

Environment society and black death in Sweden

Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic

Reduction in grain pollen indicates population decline, but not necessarily Black Death mortality‘

‘What really makes you ill’. Lester and Parker