Broken pottery reveals devastation of Black Death

Just as fossils track species, excavated shards illustrate the rise and fall of towns

Working in the quiet villages of rural eastern Britain, surrounded by welltended gardens and quaint country homes, Carenza Lewis has eyes only for what’s below her feet.

Beneath the surface, she knows, lies testimony to a catastrophe.

“Under every village, every community, there is a huge reservoir of archeological evidence just sitting there,” she said.

“Evidence of these life-shattering events that people like us would have lived through — or not.”

Lewis, an archeologist and professor at the University of Lincoln, is looking for bits of broken pottery from around the time of the Black Death — fragments that can illustrate how communities were affected by the illness that swept through the area 6 1⁄2 centuries ago. In a paper published in the Antiquity journal this week, she reports that her discoveries demonstrate a 45-per-cent population decline between the century just before the plague hit England and those after.

The devastation, she wrote, is “evident on an eye-watering scale.”

The study backs up contemporary accounts of the pandemic’s impact on mid-14th-century England.

Until the past 50 years, historians believed the devastation was as awful as described and accepted that the plague probably did kill a quarter to a half of Europe’s inhabitants and instigate widespread social upheaval.

But solid, scientific evidence was hard to come by. Centuries of excava- tion haven’t revealed the mass graves that contemporaries wrote about and, because of shifts in taxation strategy, there are no census records to back up the reports.

Lewis’s study, which uncovered about 10,000 shards of pottery from 50 towns across a wide swath of eastern Britain, found evidence of dramatic population shifts in almost every one of those communities. Human communities “shed pottery like dandruff,” she said. Much like fossil records illustrate the appearance and extinction of species, pottery records show the rise and fall of towns. With the help of community members (including hundreds of school kids) overseen by professional archeologists, Lewis and her colleagues excavated 2,000 one-meter-square pits in church yards and front gardens across the region.

Pre-Black Death pottery — easily identifiable by its dull, grey-brown colouring and sandy texture — was abundant in every spot Lewis searched for it. But the pottery of the next 200 or so years, when technologies changed to make vessels thinner and lighter in colour, was scattered far more sparsely.

About 90 per cent of towns saw a drop, some of them by more than half. On average, there was about 45-per-cent less pottery after the plague period than before it. This seems to support written accounts that claim death tolls between a quarter and half of the population.

Lewis hopes to use the same technique to map the devastation of the Black Death in towns throughout Britain.

She hopes her research will give a “baseline understanding” to researchers studying population shifts in the wake of the disease.