We have all heard of the Black Death and how it scythed its way through England and the rest of Europe in the late 1340s, and we hear that a third or perhaps even half of the entire English population died in this terrible pandemic. However the numbers are so vast that the victims become little more than statistics. They blur into a kind of unreality, a mute testimony to a catastrophe beyond imagination or comprehension. The Black Death in England aims to rectify this by giving names to some of the people who died in the fourteenth-century epidemics of the Plague Years and recognises those who lived through it, recreating something of their lives and what they went through. AUTHOR: Kathryn Warner holds a BA and an MA with Distinction in medieval history and literature from the University of Manchester, and is the author of numerous books on fourteenth-century history. Kathryn has had work published in the English Historical Review, has given a paper at the International Medieval Congress, and appeared in a BBC documentary. 20 b/w illustrations
