COUNTY WAS DECIMATED BY BLACK DEATH
Takes a look at what impact the plague had and how its influence is still felt across Kent
If you think living through the protracted political quagmire of the Brexit debate over recent years has driven us all to the brink of despair, consider yourself lucky you weren’t living in Kent some 650 years ago.
Because a disaster would befall the county which would see between a third to half of the population wiped out. Families were decimated; agriculture - the main industry at the time - was left in disarray; and entire villages were laid waste.
The plague, or
Black Death, was ruthless. And it ripped through
Kent in the mid-14th century, changing aspects of it forever.
And while lying dormant for months, sometimes years, it would return frequently over the next 300 years claiming even more victims.
Some three million people are thought to have died nationwide.
There has never been anything like it before or since.
“Kent in the early 14th century was a highly populated county,” explains Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, an expert in medieval times who works at both the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University. “It was a rich county in so much as it had good agricultural land, there are lots of small towns and lots of sea ports, as you would expect.”
The major towns we are so familiar with today would have already seen settlements, but much of Kent was defined by hamlets and some villages with farmsteads dotting the landscape. What’s more, the county had made considerable strides following the great famines of the early 13th century which killed many.
“So it was a prosperous county before it was hit by the Black Death which was around 1348-50,” the academic explains.
The plague had originated in China and spread via trade routes across Europe – carried on the fleas of rats which stowed aboard merchant ships.
The first cases in the UK were spotted in June 1348 in the south and south west. It quickly spread and struck London just a few months later. By the summer of 1349 it had gone nationwide.
With victims highly contagious, once you had contracted the bug it could kill within a week. Dr Sweetinburgh said: “There’s no way of saying how it came into Kent or where as there are not chronicle accounts.
“One assumes it was so quick and would spread from one place to the next. It’s not going to arrive at one port, it’s going to arrive at multiple places and spread.
“And you have to remember people were travelling across the Channel on a daily basis to trade with France.”
William de la Dene, a chronicler who wrote in the Rochester Cathedral Priory, provides one of the few surviving snapshots of what life was like in the county