The Black Death
The Black Death of 1348-49: what the plague was, how it spread, its devastating death toll; how it changed society by giving surviving workers more power and higher wages
What a learner can do afterwards
- Describe what the Black Death was and at least two symptoms
- Explain how the plague spread (fleas on rats, person to person)
- Describe one major way the Black Death changed society (fewer workers led to higher wages, peasants gained power)
The lesson
The Black Death was a deadly sickness that swept through Europe in 1348 and 1349. It made people sick very fast. Two clear signs were a high fever and painful swollen lumps under the skin, called buboes. Doctors at the time had no cure, and the sickness killed a huge number of people in just a couple of years.
Think about the villages you learned about, where families lived close together and shared wells and market days. That closeness helped the plague spread fast. If one person in a village got sick, the neighbors who visited, traded, or prayed with them often caught it too within days.
Remember the medieval pyramid of power, where peasants sat at the bottom with the least say? After the plague, that started to change. Peasants who survived could demand better pay or move to a new lord's land, because workers had become hard to find.
The Black Death spread through flea bites and close contact between people, and losing so many workers ended up giving the survivors more power and better pay.
Watch it
Where it sits
Learn first
This opens up
Nothing builds on it yet.
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.