An image from the British Library (circa 1385–1400), depicting the Mayor of London executing Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, while King Richard II looks on. (illustration credit ill.7)
[Death] hath a thousand slayn this pestilence.
And, maister, er ye come in his presence,
Me thinketh that it were necessarie
For to be war of switch an adversarie.
Beth redy for to meete hym everemoore.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s
Tale,” The Canterbury Tales, 1380s
MOST PEOPLE KNOW British poet Geoffrey Chaucer because he wrote one of the earliest works of literature in English, The Canterbury Tales. What you may not know is that Chaucer came of age in a postapocalyptic world. Born in the 1340s, Chaucer would have been a little boy when the Black Death first struck England, in 1348; in the next few years it wiped out over 60 percent of the population of the British Isles. The son of a wealthy wine merchant, Chaucer grew up in London, already a bustling city where traders arriving in ships from Europe would have brought news of the “pestilence” ripping through the continent. The late 1340s marked the first great pandemic of what would later be called the bubonic plague, and the death tolls were so high that most bodies were thrown into mass graves because churchyards were overflowing. Even if there had been room for the corpses, it’s likely there were not enough clergy left to coordinate burials. Chaucer came of age in the wake of a pandemic so deadly that half the population of London perished.
We hear of the Black Death only rarely in Chaucer’s considerable body of work, most memorably in the lines I’ve quoted above from The Canterbury Tales. The corrupt Pardoner is telling his fellow travelers a tale of three angry drunks who decide to kill Death, to avenge their friend’s murder. Violently intoxicated, they demand that a little boy carrying corpses to the graveyard tell them where to find “Deeth.” The boy warns them that Death “hath a thousand slayne this pestilence,” or slain a thousand people during the last bout of plague. The boy adds that they should be ready to meet Death “everemoore,” anytime. This casual reference to “pestilence,” written over 40 years after the plague first shattered England, indicates how ordinary the specter of mass death had become for people of Chaucer’s generation. The disease had returned again and again to claim thousands of lives during the late fourteenth century, though not with the ferocity that it had in Chaucer’s boyhood. The pestilence may not have touched the poet’s writings much, but its social reverberations marked his life and those of all his countrymen.
Plague was a symptom of the problems humans had adapting to our own growing societies. By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, we were old pros at the symbolic-culture game that helped us outlast the Neanderthals, but we still had little experience with using that symbolic culture to unite large societies made up of many disparate groups. Humans first began experimenting with such societies during classical antiquity, in sprawling ancient empires like those of the Assyrians, the Romans, the Han, and the Inca. But these civilizations were exceptions rather than the norm for most people. During Chaucer’s lifetime in the Middle Ages, however, humanity began laying the foundations for what would over the next five centuries grow into modern, global society. And this transformation meant that for the first time, the greatest threat to humanity came not from nature, but from ourselves.
In a country whose population was only 40 percent of what it had been in the years before his birth, Chaucer grew up with opportunities he might never have had otherwise. A man of lively intelligence, he got an uncommonly good education working as an esquire at the court of Edward III, a typical role for the child of a wealthy merchant. He managed to get good legal training by studying with attorneys who worked in the court’s “Inner Temple,” essentially a medieval law school. And then he found paying work as a representative for various members of the royal family, conducting business for them abroad (where he learned French and Italian) and eventually in London. Because Chaucer did so much business for the crown, he left a surprisingly detailed paper trail, including travel authorizations, expense accounts, promises of payment, and legal documents. Scholars have pieced together his life from these scraps of paper.
We know from these records that for twelve years, the former esquire lived with his wife and children in Aldgate, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of London. Chaucer’s home was a fine set of rooms right above a gate in the ancient defensive walls that surrounded the city. In typical feudal fashion, the mayor had granted the dwelling to Chaucer rent-free at roughly the same time that Edward III put the future poet in charge of managing export taxes on wool in London’s Custom House. Apparently, Chaucer was quite good at his job. He did valuable accounting for the kingdom during the day, and probably made his first efforts at writing poetry during the evenings. Though Chaucer managed vast sums of money for the crown, he and his family were what would one day be called middle class. Connections to the royal family gave them just enough stature to merit a good living (his salary included a daily gallon pitcher of wine), and a nice home. One side effect of the Black Death was a dramatic reshuffling in the upper echelons of society, whose members had been thinned by the pestilence. Chaucer flitted from one good job to the next, always working closely with the crown, because there was a shortage of educated men who did not owe blood allegiance to one aristocratic family or another.
The same grisly population crash that sent Chaucer and his family up the social ladder was affecting the peasant class, too. And in 1381, Chaucer’s life was threatened by the results. It was the year of the Peasants’ Revolt, a series of violent riots fomented by peasants demanding better wages and treatment. They happened literally beneath the Chaucer family’s windows in Aldgate, and many of the rioters were armed with weapons and torches; the angry protesters left a lot of Chaucer’s rich neighbors dead.
But why did a disease epidemic lead to riots for better pay? Call it cultural adaptation in action. Jo Hays, a historian at Loyola University whose work focuses on pandemics in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, explained that the Black Death had upset a stalemate in class relations that had lasted centuries. Peasants, long tied to the land by the feudal system, had been trapped in serfdom because there were no other options. As the peasant population ballooned, their lords could afford to grant them less and less—it was a landlord’s market, as it were. The poor starved, but had no options. When the Black Death hit, most of the people who died were impoverished folk whose health was already compromised by lack of food. The survivors, like Chaucer, found themselves in a world where jobs were suddenly plentiful. Couple this situation with the rise of money wages (like those Chaucer’s family got as merchants) instead of land grants, and for the first time in centuries, peasants could exercise a degree of choice over their work.
An image from the British Library (circa 1385–1400), depicting the Mayor of London executing Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, while King Richard II looks on. (illustration credit ill.7)
The magnitude of the plague also called into question every form of authority in the medieval world. Though the Church called the pestilence a punishment from God, it was hard to avoid noticing that so-called godly men and women were meeting the same fate as the godless—nor did their prayers prevent the plague. Indeed, Chaucer was highly critical of Church officials in The Canterbury Tales, a sentiment he voiced because it reflected popular, though controversial, ideas in his day. Likewise, the common people began questioning government authorities in the wake of the Black Death, especially once serfs had a better bargaining position.
Still, those authorities did their best to cling to the old rules. In the wake of the Black Death, the British government reacted to the labor shortage by trying to limit wages by law. In 1351, just four years after the first plague year, the English Statute of Laborers stipulated that all wages should be held at the pre-pestilence levels of 1340. The situation quickly became untenable. Angry peasants demanding better wages stormed Chaucer’s neighborhood, burning homes and dragging rich people from their rooms to be killed. It’s not clear whether Chaucer was actually at home when the riots happened, but some of his friends and business associates were murdered during the mob violence. Soon after, the government repealed the statute, along with similar laws, allowing peasants to earn higher wages and achieve some autonomy from their landlords. Within days of the Peasants’ Revolt, Chaucer gave up his cozy rooms in Aldgate and moved permanently to Kent, near Canterbury, beginning a new career as an estate manager and city planner. The city where he’d grown up had transformed so radically that he no longer felt welcome there.
Similar rebellions racked France and Italy, as the surviving laborers realized how valuable they were in a depopulated Europe. Though bloody at first, this kind of rebellion led to better treatment of workers and eventually to the rise of the middle classes. The benefits of these social reforms extended even to women, a group who had almost never been part of the traditional labor force. After the Black Death, there was a rise in the number of women running their own taverns. (We see the evidence in records of who was purchasing grain for brewing beer, where there is a notable uptick in female buyers.)
The first wave of plague also led directly to some of the first city-planning efforts aimed at improving the lives of the general populace. In the wake of the pandemic, many cities established boards of public health, which by the fifteenth century were responsible for sanitation and waste disposal in cities like Florence and Milan. These boards also engaged in what today we’d call “health surveillance,” compiling weekly lists of people who died from epidemic diseases so that officials could spot a pandemic before it became widespread. Just as we do today, city officials in early Renaissance Florence would establish quarantines for people afflicted by disease, to prevent a major outbreak.
The scale of the fatalities from the Black Death during the 1300s was caused by the structure of the societies where it spread. Close living conditions made a deadly disease into an apocalyptic pandemic. SUNY Albany anthropologist Sharon DeWitte worked with a group of biologists who sequenced bacterial DNA from medieval victims of the epidemic. They discovered ample evidence that bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is almost always spread by contact, not air. Urban societies, with their closely packed populations, were therefore ideal breeding grounds for Y. pestis. The other major cause of the near-extinction events during Chaucer’s childhood was lack of food. In 1348, the Black Death came soon after a terrible famine had weakened the immune systems of people, mostly the poor, who had the least to eat. An epidemic became a “Black Death” in part because of how the ruling class allocated economic resources.
The plagues of the late fourteenth century called attention to one of the greatest threats to human adaptability in an urbanizing world. Put in the simplest possible terms, that threat is a stark class division between rich and poor. When many people live in close proximity, but a large portion of them are trapped in deprived, unhealthy conditions, the entire society is put at risk of extinction. Pandemics spread rapidly among the vulnerable, bringing death to everyone. But this isn’t just a matter of epidemiology. Feudalism was an economic system which kept a major part of the population locked into poverty, and it was so rigid that any perturbation of the social order left it open to disruption. The pestilence that Chaucer described coming “everemoore” attacked a society whose rules made it both biologically and culturally vulnerable.
And yet the humans who survived one of the greatest disease apocalypses in our history did not respond with despair and a descent into savagery. There was no zombie freakout scenario, as we like to imagine today. Instead, the Peasants’ Revolt led to social reforms that improved the lot of the poor in the decades that followed. Our facility for cultural adaptation can bloom even in the wake of seeming apocalypse. Though it would be centuries before the renewed interest in science that arose with the Age of Enlightenment, let alone the germ theory of disease, the humans who survived the plague managed to lay the foundations for political structures in which every class could advocate for its own best interests. At the same time, newly created health boards stood a chance of protecting vulnerable populations, too.
As European cities grew and feudalism crumbled, the rise of the market economy forged new connections between urban societies through international trade. Humans once again raced to adapt to the dangers created by a global civilization with a massive, vulnerable population.
Though epidemics seemed to hit roughly once a generation in England, the plague summer of 1665 killed so many people that it was called simply the Great Plague. It was also a period of rapid cultural change, when class divisions again took on deadly proportions. In the diaries of a young, well-connected naval official named Samuel Pepys (pronounced peeps), we have a record of daily life during this time.
In late August of 1665, Pepys described the streets of London in his diary:
But now, how few people I see, and those walking like people that have taken leave of the world.… Thus this month ends, with great sadness upon the public through the greatness of the plague, everywhere through the Kingdom almost. Every day sadder and sadder news of its increase. In the City died this week 7496; and all of them, 6102 of the plague. But it is feared that the true number of the dead this week is near 10000—partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them. As to myself, I am very well; only, in fear of the plague.
Pepys’s horror grows as the death tolls rise, even as he must continue going about his business—which, by the way, was booming in the plague year. As his neighbors fall prey to the disease, he sees “Searchers,” groups mostly of women, who inspect houses looking for evidence of the Black Death. Where they find it, the Searchers impose quarantine on the people living there, and mark the doors with red crosses. In the passage I’ve excerpted from above, Pepys describes empty streets where a few brave people outside like himself walk around in a daze. He’s wandering through an apocalyptic urban landscape, recognizable to anyone who has watched movies like 28 Days Later or seen the TV series The Walking Dead.
Without access to medicine, crowded together in densely packed slums, the London poor succumbed to plague swiftly. New York University’s literary historian Ernest Gilman has pored over writings from this era, where representatives of the Church insisted that the Black Death was a punishment from God. But, he noted, by the seventeenth century these men were in dialogue with a group sneeringly referred to as “mere naturians,” or proto-scientific thinkers who believed the plague had a purely earthly origin. Though most medicine at the time would be called quackery today, the official government position was nevertheless that the disease was contagious. It was said to spread through “the miasma,” the air. These ideas led to the practice of state-enforced quarantining, but also to people wearing face masks and even washing coins in vinegar when they changed hands. Medicine and science were ideas that had achieved some social currency during Pepys’s time; a lot had changed since Chaucer dared to make fun of the Catholic Church in The Canterbury Tales.
What had also changed was the marketplace. A new class of merchants and tradespeople had come to occupy a central place in England and Europe’s economic systems, and they established trade routes throughout the world. Cities became central to this new economy, and impoverished groups flocked to the slums of big cities like London, hoping to find their fortunes in the world of trade rather than farming. As a result, Pepys could observe the stark class division between those touched by plague and those decimated by it. Involved as he was in naval matters and trade, Pepys could also profit from the very market systems that most helped set up conditions for the Great Plague. Tragically, the first stirrings of global capitalism and disease seemed to go hand in hand.
In his diary, Pepys also noted something that’s crucial for understanding the spread of epidemics during the seventeenth century and beyond: Mortality rates among the poor were skyrocketing, and yet at the same time were not being recorded. He wrote that many believed the death toll was likely 2,500 more people than officially reported, “partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number.”
Nothing would make that more obvious than the devastating epidemics that were sweeping the Americas while Pepys was getting rich back in London.
In Pepys’s time, Europeans had been carving out colonies in the Americas for over a century and a half. A lucrative trade in goods and people turned the Atlantic into a maze of shipping lanes, packed with cargo vessels bearing everything from gold and slaves to animals and produce. They also bore disease.
One of the enduring questions in American history is why ragtag groups of European and English colonists were able, in just a couple of centuries, to claim the riches of two continents packed with enormous cities in the Aztec and Inca empires, along with highly trained armies, vast farms, and millions of people. In the seventeenth century, the dominant theory would have been that God was dishing out justice to the heathen natives. Up until the mid-twentieth century, historians and anthropologists offered rationales that weren’t much better. They believed the natives were too innocent, savage, stupid, or inferior to mount a decent defense against the European invaders. In the late 1990s, Jared Diamond argued in Guns, Germs, and Steel that the Inca weren’t culturally inferior, but instead victims of historical and environmental circumstances. Diamond popularized the idea that the Inca fell to the Spanish because the Americans’ “stone age” technology and lack of writing left them unprepared to deal with the Europeans’ guns, cavalry, and greater stores of knowledge. These issues, as much as the plagues Europeans brought, were what left the Inca empire vulnerable to conquest.
Over the past decade, however, new information has emerged about the civilizations of the Americas. As Charles Mann explains in his book 1491, an exploration of new scholarship on pre-Columbian life, the Inca were technologically advanced enough to have defeated the Spanish. They had a highly developed system of writing called quipu, created by making different kinds of knots out of string, which is only today finally being deciphered (sadly, the Spanish burned most of the quipu libraries). True, the Inca did not have horses or metal weapons, but they had textile technologies that allowed them to weave massive boats from rushes, hurl flaming rocks over great distances using slingshots, and of course they had the advantage of a hilly terrain that was nearly impossible for horses to climb. What felled the Inca was quite simply a plague on the scale of what Chaucer witnessed as a boy, coupled with a raging civil war caused by a power vacuum left when several Inca leaders succumbed to smallpox.
By the time the conquistadors arrived in full force, South America was already riddled with plagues that spread easily on the vast trade routes of the Inca and Aztec empires. Imagine if a group of warriors, armed to the teeth, had descended on London in the wake of the Peasants’ Revolt. The city was depleted, and its inhabitants were squabbling violently over what to do next. It would have been easy for even a small band of foreign soldiers to step in and lay waste to the city. As Mann would have it, Europeans did not conquer the Americas with technology and writing. Instead, they inadvertently imported smallpox, influenza, and bubonic plague to the Americas, and those diseases destroyed native communities long before conquistadors like Francisco Pizarro could come in to claim victory over them.
Many of these new theories were first popularized in the historian Alfred Crosby’s influential 1972 book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. In it, Crosby argues that European and American meetings constituted a vast environmental experiment, in which plants, animals, and microbes that had been separated for sometimes millions of years were suddenly thrown together. Peas, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, maize, and other native American crops were brought back to Europe; horses, pigs, and cows were brought to the Americas. Syphilis returned from the New World in the bodies of explorers, and Europe’s plagues arrived in the New World the same way.
Just as people in Pepys’s London had no scientific way to respond to plague, neither did citizens of the great cities like Tenochtitlán and Cuzco, in regions that later became Mexico and Peru. Based mostly on written accounts of the period from explorers, as well as death records in missions, many historians and anthropologists believe that as much as 90 percent of the American population was eventually felled by epidemics. Arizona State University forensic archaeologist Jane Buikstra, who has studied the remains of people who lived before colonial contact in Mexico and Peru, believes that the Columbian plagues hit populations that were already vulnerable. In the bones of people born before Europeans arrived, she said, “you see evidence of warfare and malnutrition. Some groups were highly stressed, living in constrained, unhealthy conditions with a lot of garbage around them.” Stressed groups would be more vulnerable to introduced disease—much the way the urban slum dwellers in seventeenth-century London were, or the starved peasants in the Middle Ages.
Unlike England, however, the Americas were in the process of being colonized by foreign powers. And that, according to the historian Paul Kelton, of the University of Kansas, may have meant the difference between the typical European epidemic death tolls (up to 60 percent in the wake of the Black Death) and typical American ones (up to 90 percent). Kelton has studied historical records of North American native cultures like the Cherokee, and believes that the social and economic upheavals caused by colonialism exacerbated the virulence of American plagues. Without the colonists’ trade routes linking previously isolated groups and regions together, Kelton argues, epidemics wouldn’t have spread as rapidly. The main vector of disease on these trade routes would have been slaves taken from the American population. Even though most people don’t know about it today, the traffic in native American slaves was a thriving business in seventeenth-century America. Slavers played into already existing tensions between rival groups, encouraging the victors in battle to trade their captives with Europeans for goods ranging from guns and powder to horses and wool clothes. Slave raids, in turn, intensified warfare, and disrupted centuries-old patterns of hunting and farming. Groups decimated by slavery, their strongest warriors shipped overseas to sugar plantations in the West Indies, hid from their enemies in fortified villages and were unable to secure food supplies they needed. When smallpox hit these villages, the death tolls were stupendous.
Worse than the initial wave of epidemics was the fact that American groups had no time to recover from their losses. In England, after the Black Death hit, common people were able to continue in the same jobs and homes they’d had before the pestilence. In fact, as the Peasants’ Revolt makes clear, many were able to demand a better way of life because their labor had become more valuable. But in the Americas, new colonial governments and militias used their power to force plague-weakened groups off their lands, or tempted them into trading their livelihoods away for guns and horses. Biological catastrophe was followed by political catastrophe, which led to the kinds of displacement and poverty that can correlate with high death tolls in epidemics. In many regions, missionaries would push native groups to live in missions where men and women were separated, thus ensuring that the population couldn’t rebuild itself by forming new families and having children.
David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical doctor, sums up the issues succinctly in his influential paper “Virgin Soils Revisited”:
Any factor that causes mental or physical stress—displacement, warfare, drought, destruction of crops, soil depletion, overwork, slavery, malnutrition, social and economic chaos—can increase susceptibility to disease. These same social and environmental factors also decrease fertility, preventing a population from replacing its losses.
American epidemics were likely triggered by the same factors as the European ones. The main difference was that the rapid advance of colonial intrusions in the Americas prevented populations from recovering before they were hit with another wave of disease.
What the plagues of the past 700 years reveal is that human mass societies can magnify the effects of threats that come from the environment, like disease. As our cultures grow, so, too, do our vulnerabilities to extinction. There are many failure modes when we try to adapt to our new circumstances as creatures who can no longer wander off to found a new community the way our ancestors did. Rigid class divisions and warfare are two such failure modes, and they are often accompanied by pandemics. As the University of Colorado history professor Susan Kent explains in her recent book about the 1918–19 flu epidemic—the worst in human history since Chaucer’s time—this pandemic virus quickly became more virulent because it spread with the movements of soldiers during World War I. As waves of soldiers succumbed to the flu, new ones came to replace the dying. The virus always had fresh new hosts, who were generally being shipped across the globe to new locations where the flu would take hold. Like the Black Death, the 1918–19 pandemic led to reforms in health care and indirectly sparked several colonial rebellions reminiscent of the Peasants’ Revolt.
We can excavate a grim survivor’s lesson from the piles of bones these pandemics left behind. We are currently struggling to adapt to life in a global society, where the dangers of culture-saturated, densely populated cities have replaced the dangers of the wilderness. And we are adapting. With each plague, there arise social movements that inch us closer to economic equality and clarify what’s required to take a scientific approach to public health.
The lingering social effects of the American plagues are nevertheless a reminder that there’s a lot of work that remains to be done. Those waves of colonial-era pandemics helped usher in an era of economic inequality between colonizers and the colonized, undermining civilizations that had thrived for thousands of years. Anishinaabe author and University of New Mexico American Studies professor Gerald Vizenor argues that native cultures and peoples have survived throughout the Americas, though often in dramatically altered form. They’ve done it by maintaining communities, passing on stories to younger generations, and fighting for political sovereignty when they could.
Vizenor coined the term “survivance” to describe the practices of natives today who are connected to their cultural traditions, but also living them dynamically, reshaping them to suit life in a world forever changed by colonial contact. The difference between survival and survivance is the difference between maintaining existence at a subsistence level and leading a life that is freely chosen. As we contemplate the ways humanity will endure, it’s worth keeping the idea of survivance in mind. One of the best things about H. sapiens is that we are more than the sum of our biological parts. We are minds, cultures, and civilizations. I don’t mean to say that people can live on ideals alone: That’s obviously stupid. But when we aspire to survive disaster, we are perhaps without realizing it aspiring to survive as independent beings. We aren’t aiming for a form of survival that looks like slavery or worse.
The European and American plagues changed the world, both environmentally and economically. They also revealed a basic truth: Survival is cultural as well as biological. To live, we need food and shelter. To live autonomously, we must remember who we are and where we came from. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is especially the case when it comes to another one of the greatest threats to human survival: famine. Often, the regions most deeply stricken by hunger are also places where people have been deprived of social and economic power.