The immune system would be overwhelmed within a week.

If the infection reached the lungs, death came after just a couple of days of bloody coughing.

Anyone who inhaled even the tiniest droplets of mucus would be doomed to suffer in their turn.

No one knew it at the time, but the tightly-packed streets, alleys and houses of a place like Bristol made a perfect factory farm for the bacillus.

Vermin, crawling with fleas, lived alongside the crowded population of people and animals.

The nibble of a flea was a common irritation in this lousy, ant-heap world. And even when the buboes appeared, there was no reason to suppose that fleas or rats were responsible.

But there was no doubt about what would happen next.

The youngest, the oldest and the poorest - those with least resistance - would be taken first...

but then everyone else, too.

In a town this ripe for infection, almost half the population would have perished in the first year.

Among them, 15 of Bristol's 52 city councillors, their names struck through as they died.

Terrified and bewildered, the healthy abandoned the sick to their fate.

Whole towns, villages, even families, were cruelly divided into the living and the dying.

Husbands would have shunned their wives, fathers and mothers recoiled from contact with their children.

It 's almost impossible to imagine the utter desolation and terror, the complete collapse of everything you've taken for granted. How do you find bread now the bakers are all dead?

How do you find a physic now that none work?

And, at last, how do you find someone to cart away the bodies that have to be disposed of...

somewhere? The bigger the city, the greater the shock. In 1348, London had a population of close to 100,000. In the first wave of the plague, 300 died every day.

At Spitalfields, there had long been a medieval hospital with a cemetery attached.

Within its walls, the dead were dutifully laid to rest in their individual graves, pointing east, so that come the Day of Judgement, they would rise facing Jerusalem.

But in the grip of the epidemic, there was no time for such pieties.

Recent excavations have turned up mass pits where bodies were pitch-forked into the dirt in obvious haste and desperation.

Unearthed now the way they were dumped in, they look as if they're protesting at the indignity.

By the summer of 1349, the plague had spread to the furthest corners of England, Wales and Scotland.

Now it travelled across the sea to Ireland.

According to John Clynn, a Franciscan friar writing at Kilkenny, 14,000 had perished in Dublin alone.

Since the beginning of the world, it has been unheard of for so many people to die in such a short time.

This pestilence was so contagious that those who touched the dead or the sick were immediately infected themselves.

I, seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I truly have heard and examined, and I leave parchment for continuing this work

if, perchance, any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun.

At this point, another hand has written, \the survivors recovered from the first brutal shock of the Black Death, they asked, inevitably, \

The best guess was that the plague was caused by a corruption of the atmosphere - putrefaction - the mark of men and beasts rising from lakes, swamps and chasms.

This dank smog even had a name - miasma.

If sickness grew in stench, then sweet smells were an obvious remedy. Physicians and herbalists lost no time in devising recipes for pomanders and potions to guard against infection, or even to act as an antidote for the stricken. (MAN) Five cups of rue if it be a man. If it be a woman, leave out the rue. Five little blades of columbine. A great quantity of marigold flowers.

An egg that is newly laid, and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within, and lay it to the fire and roast it till ground to powder, but do not burn it.

And brew all these herbs with good ale, but do not strain them. And make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings. If they hold it in their stomach, they shall have life.

But if God decided otherwise, all the potions in the world would be of no avail. The inescapable conclusion was that the pestilence was laid on mankind as a chastisement for its manifold sins.

Lewd necklines, lascivious dancing and shameless adultery had brought on the plague.

It would end when the world was contrite, but it never seemed contrite enough. In the meantime, the country was laid waste. Farms were abandoned, whole villages deserted.

The accounts for the Bishop of Winchester's lands at Farnham in Surrey tell the story of a rural society in shock.

In the first year of the Black Death, 52 households - a third of the villagers - were wiped out, given the mark \

The Farnham rolls put names to the numbers, names like Matilda Stikker. She died, together with her entire family.

Or a servant girl, Matilda Talvin, who saw her master and his entire household succumb to the plague.

By the time it ebbed away in 1350, 1,300 had died in Farnham. While the plague took, it could also give.

In the first year of the Black Death, John Crudchate, a minor, became an orphan, but an orphan with assets, because he could now inherit the lots left to him by his father and another relative.

This must have been the making of a small but serious village fortune. In another place in the rolls, we learn that the harvest had become twice as expensive to gather in.

Twelve pence, written in Roman numerals, per acre, because, the rolls say, of the plague and the scarcity of labour.

Workers, it seems, were thin on the ground and were beginning to charge accordingly.

Farnham's story could be repeated all through Britain.

The countryside after the Black Death was an irreversibly altered world. For one thing, there were no more serfs.