Ken Follett's Journey Into the Dark Ages

In October 1347, a deadly epidemic of bubonic plague spread across Europe.

It came to be known as the Black Death.

In two and a half years, this plague killed 25 million people.

I'm Ken Follett, author of two best-selling novels

set in the Middle Ages, The Pillars Of The Earth and World Without End.

I set my novel World Without End at the time of the Black Death.

The book draws on the stories of real people and events

and on the latest historical research.

I was surprised by what I found

as I read of Europe descending into anarchy.

The Black Death struck me

as one of the greatest dramas in the history of the human race.

It killed at least a third, maybe half the population of Europe,

and yet because it undermined

existing conservative hierarchies,

it was also the cause of a surge forward in progress.

Paradoxically, the Black Death was progressive.

The Black Death affected almost every single person in Europe.

I was fascinated by the stories of three remarkable,

brave individuals who lived through the Black Death -

a doctor in Florence, Italy...

a monk in the cathedral town of Winchester...

a farm girl and her family in rural England.

I discovered through their true stories that

out of the Black Death, new thinking, new science

and new hope burst into life and turned the world upside down.

In the small village of Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, England,

an elderly peasant farmer, William Cranmer,

fell seriously ill in the spring of 1349.

It started with a headache.

A few hours later, boils erupted all over his body.

His granddaughters, Hilary and Olivia,

had never seen symptoms like it.

They suspected it was the Great Pestilence,

the epidemic that had ravaged much of Europe.

Within a day, William Cranmer was dead.

If it really was the plague, then Hilary and Olivia knew

that nobody in the Cranmer family was safe.

The first signs of the Black Death in Europe

had come a year and a half earlier, in October 1347.

A small fleet of Genoese ships returned from the Crimea.

The sailors had come into contact with an unknown sickness.

By the time the ships reached Sicily,

many of the sailors were dead and dying.

The mysterious disease spread throughout Italy.

In January 1348, there were plague cases in the north,

not far from the city of Florence.

Florence in the early 14th century

was one of the great cities of Europe.

It was a centre of manufacturing, finance and trade,

being a crucial link between the Christian world and the East.

It was a prosperous city, bustling with people -

ideal conditions for the spread of a plague epidemic

like the Black Death.

Florence, like the rest of Europe,

had not witnessed a major epidemic in 700 years.

They had no idea what was about to hit them.

By March 1348, the Black Death was at the city gates.

The authorities believed the plague spread

through foul odours in the dirty streets.

When the Florentine authorities heard of the approaching plague,

they ordered the city cleared of its rubbish,

but the narrow streets of medieval cities were absolutely filthy,

and anyway, nothing could stop the plague.

The Santa Maria Nuova is one of the oldest hospitals in Florence.

It's still a working hospital today.

When the plague hit Florence in 1348,

the wards quickly filled up with patients with strange boils, or buboes.

Their condition was described

by the contemporary Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio.

"The sickness began with a swelling of the groin and armpits.

"The tumours varied in size and soon appeared all over the body.

"The disease then altered in nature,

"with black or livid spots everywhere."

These were a certain sign of impending death.

People in terrible agony, had terrible headaches.

One of the symptoms was

an unquenchable thirst

that was so awful

that sometimes people threw themselves in rivers

and drowned because they couldn't quench their thirst.

I want to tell you the story of a remarkable doctor

who worked in this hospital at the time of the plague.

He became a pioneer of medical science.

Dr Francesco Guarini was both a pharmacist and a doctor,

so at first he prescribed common herbal potions.

He used leeches for blood-letting, to cleanse the body of poison.

It was a common method, but it was ineffective.

Dr Guarini could not stop his patients dying.

The plague had no known cure.

He thought he had to clean the pus out of the buboes,

but cleaning them greatly increased the danger of contagion.

There was little the doctors could do.

They had few instruments.

Dr Guarini knew that the plague was highly contagious,

and that he was in serious danger.

The hospital's monks refused to visit the dying,

but Guarini would not leave his patients.

He did what little he could to ease their pain.

The bubonic plague spread fast.

The Italian writer Boccaccio wrote...

"This pestilence spread from the ill to the healthy

"like fire among dry wood.

"It was communicated even by touching the clothes of the sick,

"or anything they had touched."

Dr Francesco Guarini had no remedy for this deadly infection.

People didn't know about germs,

but they did know that illness is passed

from one person to another, cos that's obvious.

They didn't know how it passed.

Some people felt it was through the eyes.

A beam of light from the eye would pass illness to somebody you looked at.

Others thought it came from the breath,

much closer to what we now understand to be the truth.

At the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, I met historian Dr Esther Diana,

an expert on its long history.

The main 14th-century treatment room,

where the doctors worked, has been preserved.

It's more of a chapel.

At the time, an illness was seen as a divine punishment.

First and foremost, the sick therefore had to

re-establish their bond with God.

It was seen as more important to cure the soul than to cure the body.

Medical practice in the 14th century was a mixture of religious belief,

ignorance and outright quackery.

Well, here's a typical medieval recipe.

Cut out a verse from the Bible,

from a parchment Bible, grind it up,

dissolve it in wine and drink it.

That was a classic medieval remedy, and, of course, completely useless.

The vast majority of doctors were from the priesthood,

and had more interest in spiritual remedies than physical cures.

Dr Guarini was different.

Francesco Guarini was a secular doctor, not religious,

and he was a pharmacist, a very important role,

because most doctors of the time didn't have any training

to deal with diseases.

Francesco Guarini's methods were advanced for their time...

but he was handicapped because no-one had discovered

the origins of the disease that ravaged Florence in 1348.

Professor Johannes Krause of Tubingen University is

part of a team of scientists who researched

the unsolved mysteries of the Black Death.

The bubonic plague is actually a rodent disease,

usually living in wild rodent populations

like squirrels or marmots

and from them, it can jump

to domestic rodents like mice, rats.

Rat fleas feed on the blood of infected rats.

The fleas bite the rat and suck this infected blood into their stomachs.

In the blood, you have this bacteria. It's clever,

it produces a protein which clogs the stomach of the fleas.

Because the blood in its stomach has coagulated,

the flea cannot digest it.

The rat flea abandons the rat and bites a nearby human.

When he bites the next time,

he has to vomit all the blood from his stomach into the bite.

What happens is that the bite gets infected,

it turns into these buboes, these bulbs

and the infection spreads into the whole body.

So you have this bubo and from that bubo, it goes into all organs.

The organs fail, they rupture.

It goes into the blood and after usually five to ten days,

you die a pretty horrible death.

Once the plague had infected a human,

the disease could be passed on from person to person by coughing.

The people of Florence waited in terror for their inevitable death.

The Black Death had reached Florence.

The people of the city managed their fears in different ways.

Those who could afford it left the city, secluded themselves

in the country, tried to stay away from all human contact.

But others figured eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

So, they ate everything there was to eat.

They drank everything there was to drink.

And they had amazing sex orgies in which

they just had sex with anybody they wanted to.

The writer, Boccaccio, described what happened.

"Some believed that drinking, going about singing and having fun,

"satisfying all their appetites as much as they could,

"was sure medicine for any illness.

"They spent day and night drinking without a mode or measure,

"engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure.

"And they combined this bestial behaviour with as complete

"and avoidance of the sick as they could manage."

Within weeks, tens of thousands were dead.

Whole families were wiped out.

The cemeteries filled up, and still there was no end in sight.

The plague devastated Italy.

It moved along the Mediterranean coast and into northern France.

And across the English Channel, in southern England,

people braced themselves.

Winchester was one of Medieval England's richest cities,

with a large population of 10,000.

It lies just 20 miles inland.

Winchester inspired the fictitious city of Kingsbridge in my novel,

World Without End.

Historian, Dan Jones, is an expert on 14th century England.

He has investigated the dramatic history of Winchester

at the time of the Black Death.

People in Winchester would have known for months probably,