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There can be no definitive answer to the question, ‘what was England’s population in [such and such a period]?’. Even with the sophisticated data gathering and processing techniques used in compiling the modern Census, not every individual is counted, and a few assumptions have to be made. When the question is applied to earlier centuries, a degree of intelligent guesswork is called for. Although England is famously blessed with a generous source of historical records, the information is not sufficient to provide a complete picture. However, a profile or ‘shape’ to England’s population history is certainly possible, one that may...

Black Death, pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, taking a proportionately greater toll of life than any other known epidemic or war up to that time. stis, the bacterium that causes plague. The Black Death is widely believed to have been the result of plague, caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Modern genetic analyses indicate that the strain of Y. pestis introduced during the Black Death is ancestral to all extant circulating Y. pestis strains known to cause disease in humans. Hence, the origin of modern plague epidemics lies in the medieval period. Other scientific evidence...

Scientists may have uncovered what is the largest mass burial site in Europe. The site in Nuremberg, Germany, contains the bodies of at least 1,000 people who died of the bubonic plague, which killed up to 60 per cent of Europe's population. Described as a 'nationally significant' discovery, experts think the bodies were buried at the first half of 17th century following a ruthless wave of the disease. The bubonic plague is spread by the bite of a flea that's been infected with a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. Those afflicted died quickly and horribly following a bout of high fever,...

The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death may be contributing to autoimmune disease today.Have an Autoimmune Disease? Blame the Black Death | 7:16SciShow | 7.77M subscribers | 572,860 views | November 7, 2023

There are few events in human history as ominous — both in name and impact — as the Black Death. The bubonic plague pandemic made its way across Eurasia and north Africa between 1346 and 1553. It's estimated to have killed up to 200 million people, or 60 per cent of the Earth's entire population at the time. Now, scientists believe they have pinpointed the origin of the Black Death to a region of present day Kyrgyzstan called Issyk-Kul, once a stopover on the Silk Road trade route in the 14th century. Its place of origin has been one of...

In the 6th century AD, during the reign of Emperor Justinian, the Roman Empire experienced an extraordinary resurgence, reconquering lands - including Italy, North Africa and Rome itself - that had been lost to the 'barbarians' a century before. Leading these campaigns, a brilliant Roman general named Flavius Belisarius - a skilled tactician, inspirational leader, pragmatic and humane. This is the story of those campaigns, as recorded by Procopius, an eyewitness to many of them, as well as other ancient historians, texts, and archaeological remains. Rome Strikes Back: Belisarius and the Wars of Justinian (ALL PARTS) | 2:14:46Epic History TV...

The plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that occurs in three forms. Pneumonic plague infects the lungs causing shortness of breath, coughing and chest pain; bubonic plague affects the lymph nodes making them swell; and septicemic plague infects the blood and can cause tissues to turn black and die.The burials were found in Drasenhofen in the Austrian state of Lower Austria, where archaeologists have excavated a row-grave cemetery comprising of 22 burials.Both plague victims are males who died at the age of 23 to 30 and 22 to 27 during the Early Bronze Age around...

New paper detects plague bacteria in three of 34 bodies they tested in Britain, all dating to about 4,000 years ago. Research has also found good news for rat loversThough it is rare today, we remain gripped by fear of plague. There is no vaccine against it, though it is treatable with antibiotics as it’s caused by bacteria. It wasn’t treatable at all before the era of modern medicine, and periodically sowed terror and death throughout Eurasia and the Middle East. But the burning questions of the day are: When did it emerge, and when did it first reach Britain?...

The Forum in Rome, dedicated to Julius Caesar, was completed in 46 B.C. as a site for conducting public business generally related to the Roman Senate. Much later, during the 16th century, the site was still usable—Renaissance-era people used it as a hospital. Doctors of the time knew that diseases could be infectious, so they set up protocols for dealing with them and the clothes and tools used to treat ill patients.Prior research has shown that doctors and medical researchers in Italy played a major role in establishing protocols, such disposal of instruments after a single use, and disposing of...

One of the most commonly recited facts about plague in Europe was that it was spread by rats. In some parts of the world, the bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, maintains a long-term presence in wild rodents and their fleas. This is called an animal "reservoir".While plague begins in rodents, it sometimes spills over to humans. Europe may have once hosted animal reservoirs that sparked plague pandemics. But plague could have also been repeatedly reintroduced from Asia. Which of these scenarios was present remains a topic of scientific controversy.Our recent research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy...

How did people live and die during the harshest months of the year? How did they stay warm? What did they eat? How did they keep themselves entertained in an age before modern day luxuries like electric blankets, double glazing, and Netflix? The onset of the Little Ice Age, between 1300 until about 1870 meant that the long, dark winters of the Late Middle Ages were colder and more dangerous. With starvation and death from illness always threatening to strike, winter was a frightening time. Welcome to Medieval Madness.Surviving Winter in the Middle Ages... | MedievalMadness | 178K subscribers |...

For most of human history, the disasters wrought by nature were utterly unpredictable, their causes wholly unknown. They were merely a random act of God that could lay waste to whole cities without warning. On the morning of May 20, 1202, thousands of people across an enormous swath of the Earth experienced such destruction.The Forgotten 1202 earthquakeThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered1.13M subscribers | 79,737 views | December 12, 2022

When the bubonic plague arrived in London in 1348, the disease devastated the city. So many people died, so quickly, that the city's cemeteries filled up. "So the king [Edward III], at the time, bought this piece of land and started digging it," says geneticist Luis Barreiro at the University of Chicago. This cemetery, called East Smithfield, became a mass grave, where more than 700 people were buried together. "There's basically layers and layers of bodies one on top of each other," he says. The city shut down the cemetery when the outbreak ended. In the end, this bubonic plague,...

JENA, GERMANY—Phys.org reports that a study of genetic material recovered from the teeth of people buried in the Hagios Charalambos cave on the Greek island of Crete between about 2290 and 1909 B.C. detected the presence of extinct strains of two pathogens. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the British School at Athens, and Temple University suggest that epidemics brought about by Y. pestis, which causes plague, and S. enterica, which causes typhoid fever, could have contributed to the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian...

A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in...

A deadly pandemic with mysterious origins: It might sound like a modern headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the source of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world. Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site. "We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The Black Death...

The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the...

New ancient DNA analysis has shed light on how the black rat, blamed for spreading Black Death, dispersed across Europe -- revealing that the rodent colonized the continent on two occasions in the Roman and Medieval periods. By analyzing DNA from ancient black rat remains found at archaeological sites spanning the 1st to the 17th centuries in Europe and North Africa, researchers have pieced together a new understanding of how rat populations dispersed following the ebbs and flows of human trade, urbanism, and empires...The study -- led by the University of York along with the University of Oxford and the...

Link to video...despite time shown at link, it is just over 48 minutes long: Medieval Apocalypse The Black Death

It's a simple rule-of-thumb to follow when you have a rat problem, according to Corrigan, who has a Ph.D. in urban rats studies and advises cities, including the District. “The rats do not like to chew into bleach tasting anything,” he says. “If the outside of the can smells like bleach to that famous nose of theirs, they're like, 'Well, this ain't food.’”