The movement virtually died out once the plague was over.

The Flagellants travelled around Europe scourging themselves in towns and recruiting more members. However, the chapter on the Brotherhood of the Flagellants and the Persecution of the Jews was particularly interesting. Usually the answer the author gave was ‘no, it couldn’t’ so it did seem a bit boring and pointless at times. The book got bogged down with statistics at times, debating whether the percentage that died in such-and-such a place was 25% or 27% and whether that could be extrapolated to the rest of the country or to the whole of Europe. Not knowing the cause of the disease was another aspect of the terror it inflicted on the Medieval mind. The speed with which the Black Death spread across Europe is amazing (roughly from 1347 to 1350) and must have been truly shocking for everyone caught up in it. Ziegler admits in the introduction that he has concentrated more on England in an attempt to confine the subject to a manageable length but I suspect it’s also partly because he is English himself and he was writing predominately for an English audience. It’s a pretty standard text and starts with the origins of the plague, then covers the state of Medieval Europe then the spread of the plague across Europe as it heads towards Britain. It was first published in 1969 so it’s probably a bit out of date but it’s still a good book for the general reader.

So I recently read The Black Death by Philip Ziegler which I’ve been meaning to read for years. I’m not really in a novel-reading mood at the moment short stories and non-fiction is what I crave.

The black death by philip ziegler