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Everything on the GCSE History The Black Death and Medieval Public Health poster is written out below, section by section. Use it to search the sheet, copy parts into your own notes, or check a fact quickly.
Dirty towns, clean monasteries, and a plague nobody could stop
Medieval towns were filthy while monasteries were much cleaner, and when the 1348 Black Death struck medicine had no answers.
Filthy towns
- Medieval towns had no organised public health, so waste piled up in streets and helped spread disease.
- Open sewers and cesspits overflowed, households and butchers threw waste into the street, and pigs were kept among the houses.
- The rivers and wells that people drank from were polluted by all this, so the water itself spread illness.
- Towns had by-laws meant to keep the streets clean, but they were barely enforced and the needs of trade always came first.
Cleaner monasteries
- Monasteries were much healthier than towns.
- Monks had clean water piped in from springs, latrines built over running water to flush waste away, and infirmaries to isolate and treat the sick.
- This was possible because monasteries were wealthy, well organised, and often built away from crowded towns near clean water.
- Daily religious routines included regular washing, so good hygiene was built into monastic life.
The Black Death (1348-49)
Cause and spread
- The Black Death reached England in 1348 along trade routes and killed around half the population within two years.
- At the time people blamed God's punishment for sin, miasma (bad air), the alignment of the planets, or outsiders such as Jewish communities.
- We now know it was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas living on rats.
- It took two forms: bubonic plague, which caused painful swellings called buboes, and pneumonic plague, which attacked the lungs and passed from person to person.
Response and impact
- Responses mixed prayer and superstition with early public health measures: people prayed, whipped themselves as penance (flagellation), carried herbs, lanced the buboes, and places tried to shut the sick away.
- None of it worked, because no one understood what really caused the disease.
- So many workers died that the survivors could demand higher wages, weakening the feudal system that tied peasants to their lord's land.
- The Church's authority was shaken when prayer failed to halt the deaths, though most people still fell back on religion and astrology, having nothing better to turn to.