
The question this episode answers
How did a disease that killed so many people end up giving the survivors more power to reshape European society?
How a deadly disease spread across Europe in the 1300s and changed work, religion, cities, and everyday life.
Researched & cited
Every claim is researched from multiple sources and cross-checked before narration. Daycast is made with AI — researched, written, and narrated — and we say so in every episode. Sources below.
- Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–48 | Speculum: Vol 96, No 1
- The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia | Nature
- Article | From Tian Shan to Crimea: Dynamics of Plague Spread during the Early Stages of the Black Death, 1338-46 | University of Stirling
- Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa - PMC
- The origin and early spread of the Black Death in Italy: first evidence of plague victims from 14th-century Liguria (northern Italy)
- Emerging Infectious Diseases
- Climate-driven changes in Mediterranean grain trade mitigated famine but introduced the Black Death to medieval Europe | Communications Earth & Environment
- Patterns of Conquest, Dynamics of Spread (Chapter 33) - The Complete History of the Black Death
- Report No: 2014R043
- How Plague Spreads | Plague | CDC
- Body Lice, Yersinia pestis Orientalis, and Black Death - Volume 16, Number 5—May 2010 - Emerging Infectious Diseases journal - CDC
- Surgeons in the time of plague: Guy de Chauliac in fourteenth-century France - PMC
- 3 Medieval and Modern Bubonic Plague: Some Clinical Continuities - PMC
- oup.silverchair-cdn.com
- The Black Death
- 1 Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348–1500 - PMC
- A Rhetoric of the Decameron | JSTOR
- The Black Death, 1348
- Decameron Web | Plague
- Plague violence and abandonment from the Black Death to the early modern period | Cairn.info
- 4 Epidemiology of the Black Death and Successive Waves of Plague - PMC
- The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Decameron: The First Five Days, by Giovanni Boccaccio.
- The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio
- The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents - DOKUMEN.PUB
- The Coronavirus, Animals,
- Burial Archaeology and the First Plague Pandemic | Speculum: Vol 100, No 2
- The implementation of national labour legislation in England after the Black Death, 1349–1400 - Bailey - 2025 - The Economic History Review - Wiley Online Library
- The regulation of the rural market in waged labour in fourteenth-century England | Continuity and Change | Cambridge Core
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project
- www.dhi.ac.uk
- The Rural Economy, 1350–1500 (Chapter 9) - Medieval Suffolk
- The Economic Impact of the Black Death - American Economic Association
- 16.3 The Black Death from East to West - World History Volume 1, to 1500 | OpenStax
- ANNUAL FALL McGINLEY LECTURE
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project
- Internet History Sourcebooks: Medieval Sourcebook
- 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Flagellants - Wikisource, the free online library
- Imagined Communities and Imaginary Plots: Nationalisms, Conspiracies, and Pandemics in the Longue Durée | Nationalities Papers | Cambridge Core
- The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9), Now Commonly Known as The Black Death., by Francis Aidan Gasquet; a Project Gutenberg eBook.
- 9 Plague as Metaphor
- More continuity than change following the Black Death epidemic in medieval Cambridge - PMC
- Antisemitism in History: From the Early Church to 1400 | Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Pope Clement VI, 1348 Papal Document | Center for Online Judaic Studies
- Beyond Plague Pits: Using Genetics to Identify Responses to Plague in Medieval Cambridgeshire | European Journal of Archaeology | Cambridge Core
- Boccaccio on the Black Death: Text & Commentary - World History Encyclopedia
- The Politics of Wardship: A New Perspective on Societal Dissatisfaction and Civic Unrest in Late Fourteenth-Century London: The London Journal: Vol 50 , No 3 - Get Access
- Ambion deserted medieval village, Dadlington & Sutton Cheney - 1008549 | Historic England
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project
- Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death* | Past & Present | Oxford Academic
- Health Ordinances of Pistoia, 1348 | World History Commons
- Expelling the Plague: The Health Office and the Implementation of Quarantine in Dubrovnik, 1377-1533 | JSTOR
- 1348 Ordinances of Pistoia.sat aft
- Selection pressure and institutional adaptation: An evolutionary comparison of the 1340 and 1348 epidemics in Florence, Italy | Journal of Evolutionary Economics | Springer Nature Link
- Selection pressure and institutional adaptation: An evolutionary comparison of the 1340 and 1348 epidemics in Florence, Italy | Journal of Evolutionary Economics | Springer Nature Link
- Conclusion - Creating the Florentine State
- long-term economic effects of pandemics: toward an evolutionary approach | Industrial and Corporate Change | Oxford Academic
- Full article: Peasants and food security in England and Wales c.1300
- After the Black Death: Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England. Mark Bailey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xvi + 376 pp. $45. | Renaissance Quarterly: Vol 78, No 1
- Wool and cloth production in late medieval and early Tudor England - Oldland - 2014 - The Economic History Review - Wiley Online Library
- Mortality Risk and Survival in the Aftermath of the Medieval Black Death | PLOS One
- Mortality and Meals: The Black Death’s Impact on Diet in England
- After the Black Death: Economy, society, and the law in fourteenth-century England 9780198857884, 0198857888 - DOKUMEN.PUB
- Beyond the male breadwinner: Life‐cycle living standards of intact and disrupted English working families, 1260–1850 - Horrell - 2022 - The Economic History Review - Wiley Online Library
- 22.06.03 Bailey, After the Black Death | The Medieval Review
- Mark Bailey, After the Black Death: Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England. The Ford Lectures for 2019 | Social History of Medicine | Oxford Academic
- Surviving the Black Death in medieval England: recovering from illness at Warboys, Huntingdonshire* | Historical Research | Oxford Academic
- Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague | JSTOR
- Peasant women and inheritance of land in fourteenth-century England | Continuity and Change | Cambridge Core
- OhioLINK ETD: Emanoil, Valerie A.
- Katherine L French. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London. Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (PA) 2021. xvii, 314 pp. Ill. Maps. $65.00. (E-book: $65.00.) | International Review of Social History | Cambridge Core
- Medieval People in Town and Country: New Perspectives from Demography and Bioarchaeology | Speculum: Vol 89, No 3
- Servile migration and seigniorial reaction in England: the serfs of Great Waltham and High Easter (Essex), c. 1336–1361 | Continuity and Change | Cambridge Core
- Migration in Rural England in the Later Middle Ages | Migrants in Medieval England, c. 500-c. 1500 | British Academy Scholarship Online | Oxford Academic
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project
- Factor markets in England before the Black Death
- List of acts of the Parliament of England, 1327–1376
- fortunes of urban fullers in fourteenth-century England* | Historical Research | Oxford Academic
- Tom Johnson · No More Baubles: Post-Plague Consumption
- Reaction and Regulation, 1349 to 1380 | After the Black Death: Economy, society, and the law in fourteenth-century England | Oxford Academic
- Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World | The Journal of Economic History | Cambridge Core
- Dangers of Noncritical Use of Historical Plague Data - PMC
- Pandemics, Places, and Populations: Evidence from the Black Death
- The Economic Impact of the Black Death - American Economic Association
- The Avalon Project : The Statute of Laborers; 1351
- After the Black Death: labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in late‐medieval western Europe - COHN - 2007 - The Economic History Review - Wiley Online Library
- The commercialization of labour markets: Evidence from wage inequality in the Middle Ages - Claridge - The Economic History Review - Wiley Online Library
- Serfdom - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
- The world health report 2007
- WHO EMRO - Halat Bu Maher: the past and present use of quarantine in Bahrain
- Reviews/Analyses
- Epidemic disease and the state: Is there a tradeoff between public health and liberty? - PMC
- Art and Death in the Middle Ages - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- The <i>Danse macabre</i> in the Burgundian Netherlands
- Black Death and medieval art | Grove Art
How was this episode?
Related episodes

The French Revolution
History Deep DivesAug 6, 202617 min


