Published: 13 January 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
When people feel unsafe, the pull towards hatred is strong. JANE CARO considers what we can learn from life after another plague feels a glimmer of hope.
“Do you see the line at the top? Where the stone is darker above than below?”
I was part of a tour group in Exeter Cathedral in England, and our enthusiastic local guide was gesturing towards the soaring roof. We all looked up and nodded because, once pointed out, the line was very clear.
“We can date that line to 1349.” She said, “The year the plague came to Exeter, the Black Death.”
As I found out later it wasn’t called The Black Death at the time. It was called “The Great Mortality”.
Our guide went on to tell us that all work halted on the cathedral that year. She then explained that the already cut stone had laid out in the weather for years. I am sure she said 50 years, and the cathedral was completed in 1400, but that may be an exaggeration. Anyway, however many years it was, according to our guide, the stone changed colour in the weather and that is why the top of the cathedral walls are darker than the walls lower down. “The Great Mortality” was literally written in stone.
Estimates of the death toll from the plague range from 20% of the population of Europe to 60%, but just like the death toll from the current pandemic, the figures are hard to verify. We do know, that just like Covid, the plague killed vastly more of the poor than the wealthy, perhaps because the fortunate could make an escape to safer places, often carrying the plague with them, of course. Shades of the naming and shaming those who broke travel bans in the early days of our pandemic.
Unlike Covid, there was no effective medical intervention in the 1300s and no one knew for centuries how the Y-pestis bacterium was spread. Like Covid, superstition, magical thinking, conspiracy theories and hocus pocus of all kinds were rampant. It was more understandable then, when doctors knew little, than now when modern medical science has been able to protect so many of us.
