Brief introduction

In the perspective of the history of the Black Death, the British Isles are usefully divided into the two main islands of Britain and Ireland and presented in two separate chapters. Britain consists of England, Wales and Scotland, and the term includes here the associated coastal archipelagos and numerous other islands of various sizes and locations and contains a territory of nearly 230,000 km2. At the time, the Shetland Islands and the Orkney Islands were Norse territories under the Kingdom of Norway, and the Hebrides and the Isle of Man had been ceded by Norway to Scotland in 1237.

On the eve of the Black Death, the Kingdom of England contained nearly 6 million inhabitants distributed on a territory of 130,500 km2, and, thus, living at an average density of about 40–45 persons/km2. This is somewhat higher than in Italy and France, and may suggest that scholars arguing for a lower range of population size, 5–6 million, may have a point. This modification would indicate much the same population density as in Italy and France, around 40 persons/km2, which hints at a general medieval maximum population density on the basis of the prevailing agricultural techniques and the strong limitations on importation of grain and flour in relation to population size. Also in England, the huge majority of the population lived in the countryside, some 85–90%. At the time of the Black Death, the English kings had conquered a substantial part of Wales but the history of the Black Death in Wales is still usefully discussed in a separate subchapter (11), and so is Scotland (12).

The wealth and variety of English medieval sources, including the history of the Black Death, is unrivalled by any other country. English historians have made impressive efforts in the study of all aspects of medieval history, including the Black Death but mainly in the form of specific case studies, with relatively little emphasis on synthetic work. For the first time, for instance, all English manorial mortality rates were gathered together, collated and synthesized in the first edition of this book, in all a very impressive number of 81 mortality data; below the number has expanded to 123.