In the Year of Our Lord 1349...
..a violent pestilence broke out beyond measure,
in the whole of the kingdom of England.
Many were compelled to bury their dead in places unseemly,
not hallowed or blessed.
Some, it was said, cast the corpses into the river.
1349 was the year Britain died.
The year of the Black Death.
It is the most lethal catastrophe in recorded human history.
Now, Europe's biggest engineering project has brought
the victims back from the grave.
It's a unique opportunity to solve the greatest
mysteries of the Black Death.
No-one knows how many were killed.
No-one knows exactly what killed them.
No-one knows how society survived.
But the dead have returned...with a warning.
The plague has what it takes. The plague can do it again.
It's a message we can't afford to ignore.
Porton Down in Wiltshire is Britain's front line
of defence against biological attack.
Behind these walls, a dangerous killer is kept in maximum security.
Its name is Yersinia Pestis.
Otherwise known as Bubonic Plague.
And for Tim Brooks, it's a clear and present danger to national security.
We maintain a constant watch on what is going on.
Whenever something happens that's unusual,
the appearance of a new disease, then we think about
how that's going to affect the UK.
Bubonic Plague still thrives on four continents.
But right now, the greatest threat is on the African island of Madagascar.
Rats and their fleas are spreading plague to the human population.
In the last year, 60 people have died.
Madagascar is only a few hours by aeroplane.
And an individual could well be back in the UK before the disease
presented and a case of plague would appear here.
The deadly bubo, in the groin or armpit,
is packed with millions of plague bacteria.
The intensity of that infection and the tightness that that has,
it's incredibly painful.
There are accounts from the Middle Ages of people literally
barking like dogs with the sheer pain of the buboes before they died.
Tim Brooks keeps the modern plague under close observation.
Because the Government must be prepared for new global
outbreaks of untreatable disease.
It's certainly possible that there could be a pandemic which
we don't have an immediate cure.
A few have what it takes to be a major world player
in the sense of causing a huge amount of casualties.
It's a nightmare scenario.
But Tim Brooks is taking heed of a warning from the past.
The Black Death came from Central Asia,
wreaking carnage across Europe.
By the autumn of 1348, it was lapping at Britain's shores.
At Westminster, the Government of the day was ready.
Historian, Ian Mortimer, is the biographer of King Edward III...
..the Monarch who had to lead the nation through its darkest hour.
He's got the vision of what he wants to do,
he knows how to do it, he knows how to inspire people
and he has the vision of what he wants to achieve.
His responsibility, plus that vision together,
make for an extremely capable man.
Early in 1348 he would've been aware that there is this terrible
disease covering the whole of Europe.
It became apparent over that year that it was coming closer, and closer, and closer.
Edward had proof that the Black Death was master of peasants and Kings.
He'd sent his beloved 14-year-old daughter, Joan,
to be married to the son of the King of Castile.
She only got as far as Bordeaux.
With what intense bitterness of the heart we have to tell you this.
Destructive Death, who seizes young and old alike, sparing no-one,
and reducing rich and poor to the same level,
has lamentably snatched from both of us our dearest daughter,
whom we loved best of all, as her virtues demanded.
One of our own family has been sent ahead to Heaven to reign
amongst the choirs of virgins,
where she can gladly intercede for our offences before God himself.
The shattered King knew a dark shroud was falling on his kingdom.
In London, his ministers prepared for mass casualties.
They planned to bury the dead beyond the City Walls
in a vast emergency burial ground at West Smithfield.
Historians believe the cemetery was here,
in what's now Charterhouse Square.
It takes its name from the nearby religious institution
of the Charterhouse.
The Square has been almost completely undisturbed
since the 14th century.
But in March 2013,
21st century engineering gave archaeologists a unique opportunity.
Crossrail, a new London railway network is digging
26 miles of tunnels beneath the city.
And this construction shaft in Charterhouse Square opened
a gateway to the past for Crossrail's Chief Archaeologist, Jay Carver.
We had indications from historical records that this area is
noted as being set aside for a burial ground at that time.
So we had a suspicion, although we could have dug this hole and found absolutely nothing.
Jay's suspicions were rewarded.
The West Smithfield victims were waiting to emerge.
The first thing to be revealed was a skull.
It became evident, they're very obvious when you see them in an excavation.
The team then immediately switched to hand excavation to
carefully draw the soil back and see exactly what we'd found.
The bodies had been buried in distinct layers.
The oldest and deepest contained 13 people.
They were sealed in with a blanket of clay.
As if to smother any contagion.
Another 12 bodies had been laid directly on top...
..with a final capping of clay.
The victims have been brought to the Charterhouse for analysis.
For bone specialist, Jelena Bekvalac,
they're a precious human link to the city's greatest tragedy.
They are Londoners.
But what's so marvellous for us is that by having so many lovely
people we can then actually pick up true patterns and changes
through time and that's revealed to us directly through the people.
Most of these people were aged 18 to 45.
Where gender can be identified, there are three women, and 13 men.
Strontium and oxygen deposits in the teeth reveal the victims
came from throughout Britain.
For Don Walker, it's a cross section of the same cosmopolitan city as today.
London's different because you had constant migration,
often from the countryside to London.
They're still a Londoner,
but it's just that they lived a different life before they came in.
We're so lucky to have
so much evidence from this small little four metre hole.
Analysis of the Charterhouse 25 will give clues to the greatest
mysteries of London's Black Death.
How many people died in the city?
And what, exactly, killed them?
The victims themselves have returned with the answers.
EERIE WHISPERS
(WHISPERS) Agnes Marshall, wife of Alexander.
And they tell of Apocalypse...on the streets of the capital.
EERIE WHISPERS CONTINUE
(WHISPERS) John Daley, armourer.
The Black Death arrived in London in late 1348.
No-one knows how many died,
or even how long the epidemic lasted.
Archaeologist, Barney Sloane, has written a highly acclaimed
analysis of the catastrophe.
But until now, the death toll has been pure speculation.
There are huge gaps in our knowledge.
Historians have guessed, some of them at maybe 10 or 15%,
medieval chroniclers were suggesting nine out of every ten people died.
That's how good our knowledge of London is,
it's pretty rubbish frankly.
We do have a couple of eye witness accounts,
we get hints and suggestions but we don't get full descriptions.
Even the most haunting descriptions are vague when it comes to numbers.
It killed a great many healthy people,
removing them from human concerns in the course of a morning.
Those marked for death were scarcely permitted to live longer than
three or four days.
On the same day, 20, 40, or 60 bodies, and on many occasions
many more, might be committed for burial together and in the same pit.
Barney has found a way to work out the true figures,
with an ingenious piece of detective work.
He's brought his evidence to the Charterhouse.
These documents were written by the Black Death victims themselves.
And they're so reliable, they could stand up in court.
They're absolutely priceless as research on the Black Death in London.
As the city's merchants prepared to die,
they passed on their property in the form of a Will.
The Wills themselves are absolutely beautiful.
We can see the individual scribe's handwriting and they're very neat,
and they're very orderly, so in amongst this panic, they were still
producing really good administrative documents for the city.
The key legal phrase is "enrolment."
It's the date when the courts registered that the
Will-maker was dead.
So the number of Wills enrolled per month is a direct
measure of London's death rate.
You get a very stark view of how swiftly the Plague
descended on the city.
In the early autumn of 1348, only a few Wills were enrolled.
But then, everything changed.
The graph begins to rise in December of 1348.
People could see death coming.
By the end of May, the death rate had soared to 16 times the norm.
Just ten weeks later, it was all over.
Barney has established a timeline.
The rise and fall of nine months of terror.
There is an even more shocking revelation to come.
By extrapolating from the merchants, to the entire city,
he can calculate the final death toll.
The best current estimates are that the residential population
was about 60,000.
About 60% of them die during the Plague.
In modern London, 60% would mean five million dead in nine months.
Six out of ten on every street.
Six out of ten in every family.
There's a real connection between the people who were
dying in this outbreak, 650 years ago, and people today.
John de Samwell was a cordwainer, or shoemaker.
He made his will in November 1348.
This will have been one of the earliest Wills
written in London after the Black Death has visibly struck the city.
We have here, John trying his level best to
prepare his family for what is going to be a complete catastrophe.
The shoemaker left most of his property to his wife.
John de Samwell, Cordwainer.
To Agnes, his wife for life.
His tenement at West Smithfield.
The remainder to his eldest son.
John's bequest to his eldest son, Richard, is written in French.
The remainder to his infant, en ventre sa mere, in equal portions.
Richard's wife was clearly pregnant and the phrase used is "en ventre sa mere."
"In the belly of his mother."
It's very clear therefore that John Samwell, our Cordwainer,
is making preparations to bequeath money
and goods to the protection of the child that has yet to be born.
Will dated, 11th of November, 1348.
Will enrolled, 11th of May 1349.
John de Samwell was struck down as the Black Death reached its peak.
(WHISPERS) John de Samwell, Cordwainer.
EERIE WHISPERS
Barney Sloane's Wills establish beyond doubt that London
was on the brink of annihilation.
But they raise a second mystery.
Why was the plague killing on this colossal scale?
With the Crossrail discovery in Charterhouse Square,
25 Londoners provide new physical evidence.
The Black Death killed so quickly
that it left no direct trace on the bones.
But for specialist Don Walker,
the preceding years of life are more revealing.
We don't just look at the time when the people die.
We look backwards to try and build up a story of their lives.
Almost like a biography of the skeleton.
Don's looking for long term signs, in a male, aged over 45.
We have slight...curvature in the lower limbs...here.
A sign of Vitamin D deficiency...
..in childhood.
The bone tends to be more sensitive when they're a child.
And tends to show more markers of stress.
We see a slightly grey coloured bone.
That is actually new bone growth,
and that can be caused by all kinds of diseases.
You can use it as a generalised sign of stress in adults.
In a younger male, Jelena Bekvalac finds more signs of malnutrition
hidden away in an eye socket.
I can see that there's an indication there of the fine holes,
which would indicate to me that there are signs of anaemia.
Anaemia is a sign the victim was fighting off disease.
But he was already in agony, long before he met the Black Death.
You've got complete destruction there of the enamel
and that's actually then caused an abscess.
The untreated abscess bored through to the jaw bone.
Having had an abscess myself I know how painful it is.
It really is going to affect your health.
This is going to sort of lower your immunity
and make you more vulnerable.
14 of the victims were significantly malnourished.
The Black Death resolved very quickly in one of two ways.
Either you survive or you die.
You'd think that the people who had lower immunity,
weaker systems, tended to succumb first.
These people were ripe for the slaughter.
And Jay Carver, the Crossrail archaeologist who
discovered them, thinks he knows why.
He has historical evidence from a monk at Westminster Abbey.
In 1348, rain poured down in the South and West Country
from Midsummer to Christmas,
scarcely stopping by day or night, but still drizzling.
It was followed by the mortality of men,
which grew throughout the world.
At the Abbey, John of Reading was one of the few monks to
escape the Black Death.
26 of his 50 brothers lie buried beneath this slab.
John recorded that the Black Death was the second
catastrophe to strike the nation.
The first was Famine,
brought on by climate change.
There'd been a whole succession of famines,
really, starting with the 1290s, in this period before the Black Death.
The ground was no longer able to renew itself,
therefore there was less food to go round,
the expanding population found it harder to get enough nutrients.
We're looking at, by this point, about 10%
of the population dying, even before the Black Death had even hit.
Two Horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding on London in tandem.
Weakened by famine, the victims had no defence against Plague.
The whole of society seems to be under threat.
I mean, the mortality just so great, so many people are dying that
people believe the whole end of humanity might be coming along
and that God has decided to smite the whole of mankind.
February to April 1349 saw week after week of mounting horror.
Barney Sloane has an eye-witness account of a city in crisis.
It grew so powerful that between Candlemass and Easter,
more than 200 bodies were buried almost every day,
in the new burial ground made next to Smithfield.
Now Barney wants to know how the King's men saved
London from total collapse.
This fascinating dilemma is how do you lose 60% of a city
and still have that city function?
In the Black Death of 1349, 200 people a day were buried here,
in Charterhouse Square.
Excavations by Crossrail have found the first
traces of London's emergency cemetery.
For archaeologist Barney Sloane,
it could cast light on the city's response to disaster.
One of the ways you can look at this, is how they managed their dead.
That tells us an enormous amount about the resilience
and ability to govern of Londoners in the middle of an epidemic.
Barney plans to map out the scale
and organisation of the entire cemetery.
Geophysicist Jamie Pringle, from the University of Keele,
will bring modern forensic science to the hunt for historic graves.
We're going to use Ground Penetrating Radar,
which, as it says,
penetrates the ground and you'll be able to pick up some objects in the
ground, maybe up two or three metres depending on the ground conditions.
It's a little manual but it's better than digging it up.
It's really exciting because one, the age of the graves,
and two, it may still be here but no-one knows for sure.
History suggests there may be a specific
form of burial in the Square.
For Ian Mortimer,
it reveals King Edward III's genius for disaster management.
He was the man in control.
And so therefore he has to make sure that society remains
law abiding and stable.
And that stability does require people to have reassurance
they're going to have proper burial, and that their friends
and family are going to have proper burial.
Medieval chronicles say that Black Death cemeteries were purpose built.
There was a system of trenches for rapid burial
but they were carefully aligned, according to Christian custom.
If you have to bury 200 bodies a day,
you do not just dig a pit and throw them
all in haphazardly, as you would
with a battlefield grave, for example.
They lay everybody out in an ordered fashion, normally facing east,
and then that bottom layer of bodies all in a line will be covered with
earth, and another layer of bodies put on top, like a big lasagne...
as one chronicler mentions.
But in Charterhouse Square,
the search for trenches brings mixed results.
So, what you're saying is that, is that you've got evenly
and broadly spaced individual objects, buried in the ground?
Yeah. Anything that's evenly spaced is normally man-made.
It's unusual to have natural things like that.
The good news...
the radar map reveals faint traces of buried graves.
The bad news...
they're still few and far between.
So the density, if they are burials, the density of those is quite light?
In other words, they're broadly spaced?
Yeah, they look spaced apart, exactly.
They're not all together, which is interesting.
OK...but that's astonishing!
Starting at the Crossrail shaft,
the radar map reveals single graves scattered across the Square.
But there's no sign yet of trenches.
Barney wants to look further north,
under the buildings of the Charterhouse itself.
I would really fancy a crack at some of the ground
inside the old Charterhouse itself,
to see if there's any more burials under the ground there.
I could have a go tomorrow, definitely, and have a look.
Do you, do you work during the midnight hours?
HE LAUGHS It's a little bit tricky with the light.
There must be another part of the cemetery to the north of this plot.
If we were to be able to locate that burial ground that would
tell us an enormous amount about the way they managed themselves
in the face of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.
Government expert Tim Brooks sees parallels in the modern world.
What is really interesting to me in the case of the plague
burials is how much care was taken with these dead bodies.
There'd been some effort made to follow some religious rights,
to, actually, treat the bodies with respect.
In modern disaster planning,
this level of care is central for the sake of survivors' morale.
Our priority is to the living.
The urgency around burying bodies is not
so much one of disease control and medicine,
it's more around the social aspects
and the psychological aspects that cause immense
human distress when they see a large number of bodies left neglected.
Tim believes Edward III followed exactly the same principle.
I think that it's a fascinating picture of how human nature
has not really changed over many years.
They had all the same emotions, the same fears,
the same human strengths and weaknesses that we have today.
Geophysics could reveal the full
scale of the King's emergency measures.
The radar mapping has moved 100m from its starting point,
to an interior courtyard of the Charterhouse.
Barney's hoping for a breakthrough.
Now we're talking about these lines here, aren't we? Yep.
Right, so in terms of the geophysics,
what we're saying is that there are some returns on the equipment
that could well be burials in the Black Death cemetery?
Yes, that's correct.
We are picking up isolated reflections which look
roughly the same spacing.
Again, they look the similar size to the ones we've been
looking at in the park.
Jamie has found traces of what could be 14 new graves.
Possible Black Death victims, far beyond the square.
How confident would you be in saying that those features are burials?
Fairly, cos they're all roughly the same size,
so you imagine them they'd be roughly the same objects
and because they're roughly equally spaced as well, that'll maybe
give you more confidence that they are actually burials.
The 14 new victims hold the promise of many more.
I'm really excited about that concentration of grave data
cos there's not been reported cases of those.
It's something very, very exciting.
The trenches remain elusive.
But geophysics has given Barney a first
glimpse of the cemetery's possible full extent.
It's gone from being a kind of a line on a map saying roughly
"Here be Dragons", to being a much more solid archaeological
understanding of this cemetery.
If Barney's right,
then thousands more of London's victims will one day re-emerge.
We know that there are burials.
Tantalising traces, individual graves that may just be
the clue to where these bodies are hiding.
25 victims are already above ground.
And they may hold the key to the last
and greatest mystery of the Black Death.
For decades, experts have been unable to explain why
bubonic plague spread so quickly.
As an explanation for the Black Death, in its own right,
it simply isn't good enough.
It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause
the huge number of cases that we saw
during the Black Death epidemics.
In Madagascar, today, bubonic plague is spread by rats.
But the infection rate is nothing like as fast as in 1349.
So scientists believed the Black Death was a mutation,
a highly infectious super strain of plague.
One of the big questions is, was that organism different?
Experts can now put the organism under the microscope.
Because after seven centuries, bubonic plague and its DNA
are still trapped in the victims' teeth.
Don Walker extracts a sample for analysis.
The best tooth to use is one of the larger ones.
And this tooth will help to reveal
the mysteries of the greatest
epidemic that's befallen mankind.
DNA is like a genetic bar code.
Mutations in the code could have made the Black Death bacteria
exceptionally lethal.
But a comparison with modern plague from Madagascar brings
a shocking revelation.
Bubonic plague, today, is identical to the Black Death.
It's still there, it's still the one that we used to have, it still
has all the power and the threat that it used to have and it's only
a different set of circumstances that's keeping it in its place.
The plague itself has never changed,
But Tim Brooks believes that in the 14th century, it made a critical
switch, by spreading in a different and far more contagious way.
The evidence comes from eyewitness accounts.
"Hardly anyone dared to have anything to do with the sick.
"They fled from the things left by the dead,
"Which had once been precious but were now poisonous to health.
"People who one day had been full of happiness,
"On the next were found dead."
In 1349, no-one was frightened of rats.
They were frightened of each other.
Tim Brooks has travelled to Suffolk,
to seek out the final piece of the puzzle.
Here on the banks of the River Orwell,
entire families were destroyed by the plague.
And it happened just 100 years ago.
Government scientist Tim Brooks
is investigating an epidemic of plague in the 20th century.
The Suffolk village of Shotley is near Felixstowe
one of Europe's busiest ports.
In December 1906, an Asian outbreak of plague was brought here by rats.
But Tim thinks it might have been spread by humans.
Anne Marie Church, of Charity Farm, was the first victim.
Within two days, she was dead.
She contracted the plague
Beverley Coleman is her great-granddaughter.
It must have been awful because you always
think of December as a family month with Christmas and things like that.
And I can't even imagine how devastated they must have all been.
And this is just a month of funerals?
That's right, a whole month of funerals.
Anne Marie's 24-year old daughter, Edith,
nursed her through her final hours.
So she was the second case?
She was the second case. And she got that by nursing her mother.
A week later, Edith too was dead.
So, when Edith Radcliffe who was your great aunt,
when she died, what happened?
She had two young boys?
She had two young boys, Walter and Jack who were only aged one
and three and Edith's younger sister Alice
who was only 13 at the time, she brought them up.
Alice took the boys to safety in another cottage.
But a third sister was already sick.
A neighbour came to help, from Brickfield Terrace,
half a mile away.
How good a neighbour Mrs Goodchild
must have been to come and look after another family?
And somebody who was really very sick,
particularly when she knew that the person had died.
That's right.
I suppose in those days they were very good neighbours,
people looked after each other,
even your neighbours became your family.
Mrs Goodchild took the plague back home.
She died a week later, along with her son
and her own mother who'd come 50 miles to look after them.
Of the carers, only Alice survived.
This is how I remember Alice, like this.
She was a cantankerous old lady, very fearsome...
She had a hard life.
..but had a heart of gold.
People talk about carers nowadays
but in those days it was really wasn't any different, was it?
It was really very hard.
The key fact is that none of the victims developed
buboes on their bodies.
They had something even more lethal than bubonic plague...
pneumonic plague.
In a small number of people, before they die, the organism will spread
to their lungs and they will then develop a pneumonia.
When plague enters the lungs, the victim coughs up bloody sputum.
New victims breathe in the bacteria
and develop pneumonic plague directly.
The plague is now passing from human to human,
with no rats or fleas required.
It has the ability now to spread rapidly throughout a family.
And for a person, who's infected, going to another household
and taken ill there to spread it to them.
It's on its way to being a pandemic.
Modern antibiotics keep the plague in check,
before it enters the pneumonic phase.
Recently, we've seen one or two resistant strains of plague appear.
I think that's quite worrying but at the moment plague is responsive
to most of the antibiotics that we would usually use.
Medieval London had no such protection.
By February 1349, the terrified citizens had shut themselves
away from all human contact.
But there was no escape at home.
Family members themselves may already have been sick
and were about to die.
Time after time, these wills reveal relatives dying in quick succession.
This is one of the wills that picks out family
and a sense of the speed of the Black Death.
We can begin to glimpse what would have been a complete family tragedy.
It concerns Thomas Francis, a wax chandler.
The Ward of Candlewick, near London Bridge,
was home to the city's wax candle industry.
But by February, like every district in London,
it was filling with widows...and orphans.
"Thomas Francis, wax chandler.
"To be buried in the church of St Clement, near Candlewick Street.
"His tenement to be sold and one half of the proceeds
"To go to Agnes, his wife.
"Will dated the 13th of February, 1349."
The 13th of February 1349 is getting to the peak of the plague,
so he's right in the heart of the disaster.
Thomas's wife made her own will within two weeks.
Thomas was already dead.
"Agnes Francis, widow of Thomas Francis, chandler.
"The whole of a certain tenement,
"In the parish of St Clement, near Candlewick Street."
They leave someone behind and that's Marion, their daughter.
"To Marion, her daughter, 40 shillings and diverse chattels."
What this means is that there are intimate objects, that are being
passed on by the mechanism of this will to her daughter.
"Silver cups and spoons.
"A robe of gold work.
"And a coverlet, powdered with roses and lilies."
It's one of those wills that gives us a really intimate view
of the handing over of personal, treasured and loved
possessions from mother to daughter,
as the inevitable swallows Agnes up.
Neither of Marion's parents escaped.
Their wills were enrolled together.
"Both wills enrolled,
"The 23rd of March, 1349."
That's how fast the lightning bolt struck.
NAMES OF DEAD WHISPERED
The wills remain...
the final testament of the city's dying families.
NAMES OF DEAD WHISPERED
For Crossrail archaeologist Jay Carver, it's the end of a story
that began with his find in Charterhouse Square.
We've been pursuing all lines of evidence
and we're really starting to get a great picture now of the detail
surrounding what we found and its historical significance.
The skeletons provide new evidence that Londoners fell victim to
a perfect storm of conditions.
Weakened by years of famine, their immune systems were defenceless.
The terrible weather really did undermine society.
People were at a low ebb anyway, and so they were very vulnerable.
Rats brought plague to the city...
NAMES OF DEAD WHISPERED
..but it was people who spread it through the streets.
It's that critical switch that if there is enough people in
contact with them, that allows it to spread as a pneumonic plague.
Bubonic plague lit the fire...
..pneumonic plague fanned the flames.
If you've got a pneumonic version of the plague,
how many people are likely to survive? Very few.
NAMES OF DEAD WHISPERED
Plague has everything it requires to cause the Black Death.
All it needs is the opportunity.
And it had it in medieval times.
The city, somehow, survived.
And the tide of the Black Death, finally, turned.
"It ceased in London with the coming of the grace of the Holy Spirit.
"That is to say at Pentecost, the 31st of May, 1349."
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