People have been trading for as long as there have been humans. Likewise trade by sea has been around since the first ships, well before the Romans , Greeks or Egyptians (thousands of years). By the 14th Century trade had been established in Europe, thousands of ships docked in thousands of ports daily bringing goods from the far reaches of the world for those who could afford them. The difference between then and today was the import customs each country had, or didn’t have; any good, animal, food or plant simply arrived in a country.

The Black Death has now been attributed to fleas found on rats, which travelled around Europe on Merchant ships. The symptoms consisted of a boil developing in the nearest lymphoid site to the flea bite (for example if bitten on the arm, the boil would appear in the underarm). This boil was extremely painful and for the vast majority, death followed within days. Doctors were perplexed, to them this plague appeared all over Europe, almost simultaneously, it struck the rich, the poor, the cities, the countrymen. Nothing they tried had any effect and they failed to identify the cause (they of course had very different medical abilities compared to today and hadn’t discovered the concept of germs or bacteria). However, for the first real time the word ‘contagion’ seems to have become widespread, the Doctors did realise that something was spreading the disease or somehow it was spreading, but they failed to determine how.

During the time of the Plague people became annoyed that their loved one’s bodies were dumped in mass graves. The bodies were placed in heaps and then in the evening people with carts would collect them and dumped. The extent of the numbers simply meant that individual graves could not be produced on the scale required.

When estimates place the number dead at around 50% of Europe the consequences on society and life are drastic to say the least. As would be expected, the number of sailors killed brought ships to a halt, stopping trade and the supply of goods. Laws had to be introduced to stop food prices rising, as well as to stop wage rises as labour shortages stuck. To those who could take advantage of the plague, the prospect of buying or renting land cheaply and on long leases allowed a group of well off small landowners to develop. However, the land, although may have been cheap to buy, it was expensive to employ farmers (as the workforces was vastly reduced) and the demand for food had fallen along with the population. The large numbers of people killed meant that many villages emptied, as survivors flooded to cities to find work. The shortage of peasant workers also resulted in the collapse of the feudal system, land owners were forced to employ people to work the land as this was the only method of ensureing workers would work your land, not anothers.

The effect of the Plague was felt during Tudor England, when the cheap, but unprofitable land leases given out after the plague ended. By this time (around 200 years later) the population was recovering and labour costs were falling  and demand for food was rising. This meant that the landowners (nobility) had the opportunity to end the lease and farm the land themselves or drastically increase the rent (in many cases beyond what the farmer could afford) to what the land was now worth. Either way the nobility had won both times, getting rid of the land when worthless and getting it back now it had value, whereas the poor had lost.