In the Wake of the Plague. The Black Death & the World It Made. Perennial. 2002. Copyright © 2001 Norman Cantor. 0-06-001434-2.
Norman Cantor’s slim little volume the Black Death is a great example of how to write a popular history. His main goal is to tell us, in broad strokes, what he thinks. He’s the well known professor out on the lecture circuit, not the Ph.D. candidate defending his thesis. There’s not a footnote in sight, but there are plenty of one-liners and off-handed jabs:
Late medieval England was not a welfare society. That did not happen until the application of the Elizabethan poor laws in the 1580s which, however, treated the able-bodied poor as prisoners in workhouses and gave the rest starvation-level aid. By a broader and more humane definition the English welfare state did not begin until the Labor government of 1945-51, and Margaret Thatcher would have loved late-fourteenth-century and fifteenth-centry England.
Cantor’s overall thesis is broad and somewhat difficult to characterize. In the opening section, “Biomedical Context,” and again in the closing one, “History,” he argues that the Black Death was probably not solely due to rodent-borne forms of the bubonic plague. Admitting that the biological evidence is scanty, he still makes the case that cattle-borne anthrax was also a likely culprit. “What is most puzzling about the Black Death of the fourteenth century is its very rapid dissemination, a quality more characteristic of a cattle disease than a rodent-disseminated one.” Regardless, the effects were terrifying: at least a third of Western Europe’s population were killed by it from 1347 to 1350.
Interestingly, the plague coincided with the end of a long period of warm, crop-friendly weather. England’s population was nearing six million in 1300. A few famines in the early part of the fourteenth century had begun to reduce that number, but the plague had such an impact that the English population didn’t fully rebound until 1750 or so.
Somewhat obviously, the “pestilence” (as contempories called it) had a huge social impact. The fortunes of the English monarchy changed dramatically as the Platagenet family, hit hard by the plague, lost power as the House of Lancaster was able to gain ground and sit on the throne. As the death rate mounted, a rural labor shortage slowly developed. Cantor argues that the moment was ripe for a successful peasant uprising, but the opportunity was lost, and the old social hierarchy was kept intact. The Jews, whose social isolation and dietary rituals kept their population healthier than their Gentile neighbors, were nonetheless hit hard by scapegoating persecutions, especially on the continent.
In all, this is a satisfying little book. It’s comprehensive enough to get a good glimpse of the breadth of the plague’s impact without getting mired down in a myriad of details of more use to professional historians than the broader public.
—January 11, 2005