It will be obvious from all this that to draw any conclusion must be hazardous. Little more than an informed guess is possible. It can safely be assumed that a figure of 45 per cent, equivalent to the figure of mortality among the clergy, would be the highest point of any possible bracket.
As a rough and ready rule-of-thumb, therefore, the statement that a third of the population died of the Black Death should not be too misleading. The figure might quite easily be as high as 40 per cent or as low as 30 per cent; it could conceivably be as high as 45 per cent or as low as 23 per cent. But these are surely the outside limits. On this basis the approximate total for the dead in England would be 1.4 million. No figure above one million and below 1.8 million would be astonishing but the nearer that the actual figure approached the median, the more it would seem to accord with the existing evidence.
Finally there is the question whether more or less the same proportion holds good for continental Europe. Probably the most useful observation which one can make on this is that there is no obvious reason why it should not. The regional variations which are so evident in England must be, of course, immeasurably greater in a continent with its wide range of climate, landscape and racial types. There are certain areas, for instance Tuscany, where the joint efforts of contemporary chroniclers and modern scholars make it almost certain that the death rate was higher than in England. There are others, for instance Bohemia, where the incidence of the plague was clearly lower. For most of the Continent even the inadequate medieval records which exist in England are lacking or have not yet been exploited – the material for a serious comparison does not exist. But it can still be said that there are few grounds for drawing distinctions between England and the rest of Europe.
Such calculations as have been made for individual countries are not at variance with this somewhat negative assertion. In his careful study of the effects of the Black Death in France, Renouard concluded that the only rule which could safely be put forward was that the overall death rate varied between one-eighth and two-thirds according to the region.{427} Doren has estimated that between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of city dwellers in Italy died but that, in the countryside, the proportion was considerably lower.{428} Neither of these estimates can be translated into a death rate valid for the whole country, a form of calculation which these leading authorities prudently eschewed. In so far as they point in any direction it is towards a figure greater than a third. Certainly they are hard to reconcile with anything substantially lower. But such speculation is unprofitable. To maintain that one European in three died during the period of the Black Death can never be proved but, equally, cannot be wildly far from the truth. Further than that, in the present state of knowledge, one cannot go.
ONE third of a country’s population cannot be eliminated over a period of some two and a half years without considerable dislocation to its economy and its social structure. The historian must expect to find conspicuous changes in the life of the English community in the years immediately following the Black Death. At least some trace of the scars will survive into the succeeding decades or even centuries. But exactly what these changes were and how great was their significance has been the subject of bitter and protracted debate. The subject is far from being closed today.
