Medieval plague survivors left us graffiti, court records and a lesson for COVID

Memories of pandemics are often contentious. They can be disputed, uncomfortable and politically charged. As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to feel more distant, governments, communities and families have started asking how it should be remembered.

Efforts range from personal memorials for lost loved ones to official commemoration programmes . Looking at how earlier societies remembered pandemics can help inform how we commemorate COVID-19 today.

The outbreak of plague in 1346-53, known as the Black Death , was one of the worst pandemics in recorded history. Between a third and two thirds of the medieval European population are thought to have died.

Plague did not disappear, however, and society suffered from repeated outbreaks of the disease in the centuries that followed . As my research demonstrates, despite its pervasive presence, plague may have become something of a taboo subject among survivors, though individual attempts at commemoration have been preserved.

Taboo

One reason contemporaries avoided discussing plague was because it was believed the disease could be transmitted through imagination itself. People feared that thinking about plague might make it more likely to strike. In his chronicle written in the decade after the Black Death, the Carmelite friar Jean de Venette wrote that:

Such an enormous number of people died in 1348 and 1349 that nothing like it has been heard or seen or read about. And death and sickness came by imagination, or by contact with others and consequent contagion.

Others agreed that worrying about plague made people more likely to suffer from the disease. The medieval physician Bengt Knutsson advised people to “dread not death but live merrily and hope to live long”. To invoke plague, it seemed, was to invite it.

Trauma likely also played a significant role in the reluctance of some survivors to recall plague outbreaks. Those who lived through the Black Death witnessed horrors many may have preferred not to relive. So many people died that when cemeteries were full, huge trenches were reportedly excavated into which the deceased were placed in rows on top of each other. The Florentine chronicle of Marchionne di Coppo Stefani morbidly compared the layering of dirt and bodies in mass graves to “how one layers lasagna with cheese”. Some memories were better off buried.

The contested nature of plague memories can also be seen at the end of the fifteenth century, when an outbreak of disease divided a community in North Yorkshire. One group believed the victims had died of plague, while another described the illness instead as “pyned sekenes”, likely a pulmonary illness . The disagreement was significant because naming the disease shaped how it would be remembered. To call it plague was to connect it to the most feared epidemic disease in medieval life. To call it something else was to place it in a different, perhaps less charged, category.

Such was the aversion to recalling experiences of plague that historians have suggested that “as a collective memory it was in the process of being airbrushed from history”. One striking example comes from medieval English legal practice. To prove an heir was old enough to inherit land, witnesses were called upon to recall important events that had occurred during the heir’s lifetime, such as births, deaths or marriages. Yet out of 10,181 testimonies recorded between 1246 and 1430, only 13 explicitly mentioned plague. Memories of the disease may have been too painful to recount.

There is also a more mundane explanation for these silences. What survives in the historical record is often accidental. Few contemporaries left personal accounts of their experiences, and legal or financial records were usually formulaic documents, hardly suitable for lengthy recollections of personal tragedy. Our understanding of plague memories is therefore mediated by the sources that have survived.

Although individual experiences of plague are difficult to recover, the lasting impact of the disease on medieval culture is unmistakable. The rise of the Danse Macabre, which showed Death leading people from every rank of society in a final dance, reflected widespread anxieties about dying suddenly and unprepared.

Medieval people also found more personal ways to record their experiences. Graffiti carved into church walls provides glimpses of the horrors of plague and the desire for individual memorialisation. An inscription at St Mary’s church in Ashwell (Hertfordshire) describes the plague as “pitiable, fierce, violent”. Another at St Edmund’s church in Acle, Norfolk concludes:

therefore, while in this world the brute beast plague rages hour by hour, with prayer and with remembrance deplore death’s deadliness.

Other, undated inscriptions reveal more intimate losses. One at St Mary’s church in Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire simply records: “here lies Margaret in her tenth year”.

Plague may therefore have become a taboo subject for many survivors who wished to forget its horrors. Yet some of these silences are also the result of the kinds of sources historians rely upon. The voices that survive are shaped by chance, by record-keeping practices and by whose experiences were considered worth preserving.

This offers an important lesson today. The way future historians remember the COVID-19 pandemic will depend not only on what people experienced, but also on what was recorded, preserved and commemorated.