Some reports at the time pointed to Bristol, others to Dorset. It isn't clear exactly when or where the Black Death reached England. With the harvest so adversely affected, it seemed certain that there would be food shortages. Grain lay rotting in the fields due to the nearly constant rains.
The Italian author Boccaccio claimed that the plague victims "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise." The speed with which the disease could kill was terrifying to inhabitants of the medieval world. Infected pneumonic people can spread the disease through the air by coughing, sneezing, or just breathing! In Septicemic plague the bacteria enters the person's bloodstream, causing death within a day. Pneumonic plague occurs when the infection enters the lungs, causing the victim to vomit blood. This black colouring gives the "Black Death" its name. The buboes are red at first but later turn a dark purple or black. The swellings are intensely painful, and the victims die in 2-6 days. Bubonic, the most common form of the plague, produces fist-sized swellings, called buboes, at the site of flea bites - usually in the groin, armpits, or neck. The plague produces several different symptoms in its victims. Normally there is no contact between these fleas and human beings, but when their rat hosts die, these fleas are forced to seek alternatives - including humans! The Black Death is a bacteria-borne disease the bacteria in question being Yersinia pestis, which was carried in the blood of wild black rats and the fleas that lived off the rats. Others believed that the disease was a plot by Jews to poison all of the Christian world, and many Jews were killed by panicked mobs. Not surprisingly, many people believed that the horrors of the Black Death signalled the Apocalypse, or end of time. Theories about the cause of the disease were numerous, ranging from a punishment from God to planetary alignment to evil stares. The ships were forced to seek safe harbour elsewhere around the Mediterranean, and the disease was able to spread quickly.ĭuring the Medieval period the plague went by several names, the most common being "the Pestilence" and "The Great Mortality". When it became clear that ships from the East carried the plague, Messina closed its port. It is thought that the disease originated in the Far East, possibly in the Gobi Desert, and was spread along major trade routes to Caffa, where Genoa had an established trading post. The crew of the ship, what few were left alive, carried with them a deadly cargo, a disease so virulent that it could kill in a matter of hours. In 1347 a Genoese ship from Caffa, on the Black Sea, came ashore at Messina, Sicily.
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