 Wel, ddim yn ddweud i'r dydaeth gyntaf, Gyllidon, a ddim yn ddweud i chi fel y peth yn ddeunio mi, felly rhan o'r llif fel gydaen y celfsedd o'r colli. Dwi'n ddim ddelwch credu cael bod yn fyddech chi'n gweld felly ddim o'ch bwysig i'r ddaeth chi eisiau, felly dw i ddim o'n ddweud i'n ddweud a'i drus yllafu'r hyn. Dwi'n llai ddatblywydd. Dwi'n ddweud i fynd i fynd o hyn o'r ddweud, fe ddaf, gyllidon yw'n ddweud, The Black Death was a water shed where the 14th century is a water shed in the history of Europe during which a centuries long period of demographic and economic expansion on a general level had been on an upward line. This was thrown into reverse really by succession of environmental, economic and epidemiological vicissitudes dubbed by Barbara Tuchman, the calamitous century and with a certain amount of justification. The most iconic of these was the Black Death, it wasn't the only problem but it was particularly hard hitting and is described by numerous observers cataloging the symptoms, the discomfort of these and the plight of people affected by this. And many of you will have seen these sorts of quotations before, Boccaccio is a particularly vivid writer and the images of the dead dying on the streets rotting where they lay and then heaped into the ground is something that is also reflected in some contemporary images. Boccaccio of course is writing in Italy but we see the Black Death also in England, Barney Sloan recently has mapped the numbers of wills proved for example during the Black Death which show a slight lag from the actual period of death, a time of death that takes a while for the wills to be proved. But you can see at the top down this spike and we see catastrophe cemeteries in areas known as the Smithfield cemetery known to have been purchased during the period of the Black Death to bury the large numbers of people who required it. And we have one or two of our own good writers on the Black Death describing again the same sort of picture, the notion here is even worse than the flood. Not obviously the direct experience of this, the suggestion not even a fifth part of the people of the people were left alive and again this idea that people weren't being buried, they were just thrown into pits and the account seems to be very consistent. It's strange then perhaps that for much of the 20th century, particularly the latter part of the 20th century, the impact of Black Death was really rather downplayed by archaeologists who tended to not find evidence for in places like the deserted villages. This is Warren Percy, which many of you will know. Many of these places, massive villages, completely depopulated, but actually excavations showed that these hadn't been depopulated after the Black Death or not immediately after. The impact of the Black Death was also downplayed by a number of historians with memorable comments, for example, from Bridbury who described it as just a purgative. The idea was really that it had just been a minor sort of perturbation which didn't really have any impact on social change which was underway and would have happened anyhow. Recently, however, that downplayment has been revisited, if you like. New perspectives on source material have led historians to raise their estimates of the likely Black Death mortality rates. Ziegler, in 1969, sort of went from between about 25% to 45%. Aberth in 2001 is suggesting 40% to 60%. Hatcher and Campbell have also questioned its dismissal and to some extent this reflects changes in the intellectual zeitgeist, really, I think, which is a little bit broad for me to consider now. But there's a move towards seeing sudden events as being more significant. But we've also seen new scientific techniques coming in. The paper by Kaki Aertal is a DNA analysis. The previous fact that archaeologists weren't finding these catastrophe cemetry and when they did find them, they weren't full of bodies tipped in an advanced data decomposed disarticulation. They were neatly laid out as I showed you the slide just now. But new techniques are enabling the DNA of the plague bacillus to seem to be present in cemeteries where it was previously impossible to identify them as plague cemeteries because they weren't lying in heaps. They were neatly laid out. The DNA workers also usefully demonstrated that it is plague that these populations were being stricken by. However, these advances in the understanding of the epidemiology and mortality of the black death has not and cannot alone answer wider questions about the longer term social and economic impact of the compound perturbations of the 14th century of which the black death was won. The main problem is the lack of comprehensive, consistent, reliable and scalable documentary data on population. The documentary records, there are no censuses of course from this time, the documentary records we do have are either minorial counts of which there are a relatively small number referring to individual places or they are global taxation data which rather unhelpfully the taxation system before the black death was a financial tax on a percentage of the value of your movable goods after the black death the per capita poll tax is bought in so we can't compare like with like when we're looking at taxation returns and that's even of course assuming that taxation returns would be considered a reliable and true record. The solution or one solution is the what I'm going to talk about tonight, which is tens of thousands of datable pottery sherds which have been newly recovered or recovered over the last 10 years anyway from 2000 known archaeological context in scores of historical settlements across six counties. The pottery here derived from more than 60 of these currently occupied rural settlements that is the non deserted settlements and the aim of this was that these are likely to be less atypical most medieval settlements did not end up being permanently deserted so this data has come from the places that were not permanently deserted. The method is standard for every single one of these 2000 excavations. It's a one meter square. It is dug in 10 each one is dug in 10 centimetre spits. The spoil is recorded on a pro forma basis each 10 centimetre layer is planned before it's dug and all of the soil is sieved or if it's very clay and can't be sieved. It's hand sorted through the same size mesh 10 millimetre mesh sieve finds from each 10 centimetre context are kept separate and to the end of 2015 and say more than 2000 of these excavations have been completed. The test bits are cited wherever possible because they're in within currently occupied rural settlements. It doesn't have the great ease of someone like Warren where you've just got an entire empty landscape and you can dig wherever you think would be most suitable or you can apply a sort of a rigorous sampling strategy of putting them in every 20 metres or whatever. With an occupied settlements you have to dig wherever you can. Most of the test bits are in people's gardens and the excavations have all been done either by members of the public digging either in their own gardens or somebody else's or on bits of open land like playgrounds or roadside verges within these villages or hamlets or they've been dug by teenage school children of which we've had more than 5000 to participate in this. I think there's a fitting irony perhaps that a research paper that is talking about one of the great mass mortality events of human history has been one of the great mass participation research projects. So the data I'm going to talk about and the data we've analysed is the pottery from these test bits. What we find is whatever is there but the pottery is the main useful source of material for large scale analysis essentially because there's an awful lot of it. It's widely used in the medieval period. It's very breakable when it's broken. It is very difficult to mend because it's cheap. It's not worth putting the effort into mending it after it gets discarded. When it has been discarded it's taffonomically durable. It doesn't decompose and rot away. We know that in the medieval period people using organic materials extensively but those only survive in very rare circumstances. Pottery is also immensely relatively easy to see during excavation. It's relatively cheap to analyse as well and I say relatively by contrasting it was something like DNA analysis when you're talking several hundred pounds a pop or radiocarbon dating the same issue. Pottery can be dated in large numbers much more cheaply, much of the chagrin of the people who do the pottery dating I'm sure. The other great asset of pottery is that unlike animal bone of which we also find quite a lot in the test bit pottery changes form frequently therefore that's why it can be easily dated. The unit of analysis that we use that I'm using in this is the number of pits that produce two or more sherds of pottery comparing the two centuries before the black death of the two centuries afterwards. The reason for this is that comparing the data with field walking data it suggests that two sherds is more from a single metre square is more than would be expected from non-intensive non-settlement use such as manuring of arable. To justify or to consider whether this is a valid unit of analysis we can look at the other ways that might have been done. Looking at four of our settlements and compounding, aggregating the data from all of those we can see if we look at the change in the total number of sherds from all of the pits so all of the pottery from all of those four settlements. There is a decline, a decrease of 76%. If we look at the total weight of sherds bearing in mind a sherd is a broken bit and you can go easily from having one sherd to having four just by stamping on it. If we look at the weight of sherds the decline is by 60%. The change in the number of pits producing five or more sherds so a higher threshold of if you like habitative human presence. The decline is 64%. The number of pits producing two or more sherds comes out at the lowest at 54%. The two plus unit of measurement is giving us the most conservative estimates in terms of this change and it's worth bearing that in mind when I'm talking about the results shortly. I do want to reiterate this at this point that the test fitting project was not initially intended at all to look at the impact of the back deck or the demographic crisis of the 14th century. The initial aim of it was simply to increase the number of currently occupied rural settlements from which archaeological data had been recovered and for which we could reconstruct their development over time particularly their spatial development over time. I was interested in settlement forms and settlement plans and the aim was to counter the bias that had previously been in favour of deserted settlements which should until then receive the lion's share of attention. So it was really just the study of currently occupied rural settlements that dig wherever we can reconstruct their spatial development over time. So the black death finding, if you like, was an incidental discovery and I think that makes it particularly interesting because we weren't initially looking for it. So it did however become apparent very, very soon. One of the great benefits of working with the public was that after each episode of digging particularly as they started off as a schools project with teenagers digging, they would spend two days digging their test pit and then on a third day would come into the University of Cambridge to analyse the results and sort of find out a bit about going to university and get some experience of being in a university as part of raising their academic aspirations. But as part of that we would go through, we'd get them to say what they'd found, what date they thought it had been, from what the experts on site had been telling them. And then I would do a sort of very on the hoof, off the cuff summary as we put all the information up on the maps, we'd have a power point and colour in the pits that have produced pottery of different dates. As we were doing this, I would sort of just exemplise on what I thought the pattern was showing. And Houghton and Whitten here which were two villages sort of now conjoined but initially originally separate villages. This was the second site ever that we worked on in 2005 and that was the first time that in talking through the pattern that was emerging it became apparent that there was a marked decline. The period of the 14th century rather helpfully is a bit of a watershed in pottery production. There are quite a lot of wares that sort of go from about 1150 to about 1350 and quite a lot that go from sort of 1350 to 1550. So it is a good point at which to break that divide and you can compare it with the number of the later Anglo-Saxon period which goes from about 900 to 1100. So you've got relatively standard sort of time units which is helpful. So this is Houghton and Whitten, this is the late Anglo-Saxon period. So here we've got the church here, that's the church of Houghton. There's another church here at Whitten, both medieval churches. The river Greatoose is here. So the settlements are both along the bank there. Now for all of the maps I'm going to show you, each white square is the location of one of these one metre square test pits. They are not I would point out shown to scale. They would be extremely informative if they were but would take a lot longer than two days to dig. For each of the historic periods, some historic periods are detailed up here. So this is the late Anglo-Saxon period, sort of 9th century to 11th century. If the test pit hasn't produced any pottery of that date it's shown as a white square. If it has produced pottery of that date it's shown as a circle. With the circles in different sizes depending on the number of sherds that have turned up. If they've come from spits where there's later material mixed in, the circles are grey. If they've come from layers where there's only pre-modern pottery then the circles are black. So you can see here at late Anglo-Saxon there's obviously a little sort of core of activity. Looks like a nucleated village perhaps here. They're actually not that much going on around the church. Withen not nearly so much going on. So that's just background really into the high medieval period. This is a period between the normal conquest really and the black death. We can see nearly all of the pits producing pottery. There's clearly a large compact nucleated settlement here. Withen again has grown all of the test pits around here producing large amounts of pottery. Although the largest circle is the five sherds or more in many cases, these biggest circles will be producing 20, 30, 40 sherds in some cases. Then we go into the post-black death period. You can see from that why when I was looking at the data, first of all as we covered this in, the immediate thought is well goodness there's been a huge decline here. You can see this centre of the village here really seems to have been very much hollowed out. A couple of the pits just producing tiny little sherds. One sherd of less than five grams is a tiny amount of pottery. A real hole in the middle of the settlement and withen again very extensively depopulated. So we saw this in, then we can see the post medieval recovery. Interestingly, even into the post medieval period, the recovery isn't as strong. If you go back to the high medieval period, you can see the settlement is really much more extensive than it is into the post medieval period when it really seems to be more compact. Yes, not quite as dynamic anywhere. This is including all the glazed redwares that are very easy to spot and found in large numbers. Really into the period of the industrial revolution when you get to the end of this period. So this, in fact the figures for Houghton and Whitten, by the time we'd excavated 37 pits in the village, 23 of them had produced two or more sherds of high medieval pottery, but 40 fewer had done so for the post black death period, a drop of 61%. This was obviously very interesting for Houghton and when he then saw it happening again and again. In 2010 I pulled all this together for the first time for a series of seminars on crises, which I had offered to speak at the one on the 14th century and pulled all this data together because I'd found out again and again been saying, I've got a late medieval decline here. Aggregating all of this together, I'm sure you can't see the details of the figures, but what you can maybe see the way this spreadsheet works is a negative figure shows in red. What you can see very clearly when we're looking at change over time, when we're looking at the column which is the change, high medieval to late medieval in the number of pits with two or more sherds, you can see all of these, nearly all of these sites are going red, not all of them and I will come back to that later. When we pull the data together, in fact 90% of the settlements we've dug in show a decline in the number of pits producing two more sherds of pottery. Overall the number drops when we add up all of pits across the whole region, the number drops by 44%. At one point it is about 44.7% is the current, as you would imagine it sort of shuffles up and down a little bit from year to year, but rarely by more than a percentage point. 44% then is the impact of the black down or is it? The obvious question of course has to be, is the pottery actually showing demographic change and there are a number of factors that make me think that yes we can use the pottery as a proxy for population in this case. For example no evidence for decline in per capita pottery used in the late medieval period. There certainly is a change in the type of pots we get, there's a move away from in the pre-black death period, most potteries cooking pots, there's a move in the post-medieval period, sorry post-black death period to greater use of metal cooking pots, but potters are resourceful and start making a wider range of tableware. So we still see pottery is carrying on at a significant rate, at the same rate as far as we can tell. We can't say that people are moving away from using pottery and that's what's causing the decline. Another factor which could have perhaps accounted for the drop in pottery other than population change would be a change in disposal of the pottery. Is it being buried in rubbish pits for example? Is it being taken out to the fields if you're using the same amount and it's not turning up in the settlements what's happening to it? It's got to go somewhere it doesn't rot away. Certainly though when we look at field walking we see that actually when we look across the fields there's a decline in the amount of pottery there as well. This is recent work done by a community group in fact in Wimpoll in Cambridge. This is the high medieval pottery showing the focus of the settlements there. Wimpoll is a national trust that some of you may know. When we look at the late medieval we can see not only the impact of the black death on the 14th century on these settlements but we can also see the decline in the amount of pottery out in the fields as well. There is no increase in pottery in the fields and we see this again and again and again and again when we look at the field walking. So we can't use the changes in pottery disposal. There's also no evidence for rubbish pits on the edge of medieval rural settlements. We don't see that as an explanation for why we're not finding the material. Another factor which suggests that it is about demographic change and the pottery is not some other reason is that the pottery from the test pitting does show a zoning within settlements. If we had had just a simple cultural move away from pottery use we'd expect to see an overall decline in the settlements in the amount of pottery that's turning up. But we don't see that. The pottery is zoned with some locations continuing to produce pottery while others nearby do not. So just as one example of that this is Great Shelford just near Cambridge. You can see here in the high medieval period this is the church at Great Shelford. You can see in the high medieval period a lot of the pits are producing pottery including up in this area here up in High Green. In the post black death period we can see these areas are almost completely depopulated as is the very sted area here while the village in this area clearly carries on in occupation. So we do see this zoning. It's not a general diminution in the amount of pottery and of course using just two sherds as well as a threshold also means that if you're using some pottery that's going to show up. But nonetheless the significant point really is the zoning here. The final point that makes me confident that we can use the pottery change as this demographic indicator is that we see a correlation with the historical data. Now while the estimates for short term black death mortality have ranged hugely and in fact if you look at individual mineral accounts the individual mortality rates range from zero to 100 percent. It is difficult to think of a greater possible range. They average somewhere between 30 percent to 90 percent which is a fairly broad range but generally there's a consensus that somewhere around about 35 40 55 percent is probably an approximate average. Our decline in our villages of 44 percent sits comfortably within that broad range. Now you might think it would be relatively easy to sit comfortably within a range that's quite that broad. But another good corroboration is another correlation with the historical data which shows for example that there's a very strong correlation between the distribution of poor taxpayers and of areas where there's an excess of people seeking work as arable workers over the amount of work available. This is research that's been carried out by historians like Bruce Campbell and historical geographers like Richard Smith. They show for example it's a very high rate of these poor workers these poor peasants in Norfolk an area which you'll see in a minute has very very high rates of popular pottery drop as well. And this these correlations are useful because the historical and archaeological data are validating each other and that's very useful because of course they're both affected by very different biases. The differential loop is not a circle it's cutting that circle because we can test one form of evidence against another form. So I think our question is pottery shown demographic change. I think we can say yes it is reasonable to infer that the most likely reason for the change in pottery volumes is a change in population. You can use pottery as a proxy for population and in that case the test pitting evidence is providing us with evidence for post black death change which is both measurable and mappable. And when you look at it like that it really is dramatic. Perthyn in Hertfordshire is perhaps the poster boy for this. It's had over 100 pits have been excavated all together the local community took over from one of the school projects there and really got to grips with I think 150 and they've now decided they're going to stop and write up. I'm just going to backtrack a little bit and just allude to the fact that the black death is not the only crisis that test pitting is potentially capable of identifying. This is the Roman period and you can see we've got a large Roman settlement up in this area something going on down here but nothing where the existing settlement is today into the early Middle Angles accent period. This Roman village disappears. There is one sherd of Middle Angles early Middle Angles accent pottery has come from the whole of those 115 test pits at Perthyn into the late Angles accent period. We see the village reformed on rather a different footprint less emphasis here a big focus in this central area. There is a church in this area late Angles accent church with the cemetery that turned up during development work not in one of our test pits. There's very little going on around the church and the Motton Bailey castle. It's a site frustration. This is all scheduled. This is the one era. We can't do any test pit digging. It's ironic now that this is the bit of Perthyn we know less about than any of the rest of the village really leaving that aside though. We can see into the high medieval period. This is in North Hertfordshire Perthyn. We can see how incredibly densely that settlement is the historians. Historians estimate that the population of England grew perhaps threefold, perhaps tripled between approximately the period of the Norman conquest and about 1300 the eve of the 14th century. We can see that very strongly reflected here. Perthyn looks crammed full really when you look at that map. When you look post black death the change is the other one or another interesting thing is we can see extension in this area as well. The church is 12th century or early 13th century. The Motton Bailey castle is also 12th century. We can see the village expanding in this area when the new Norman laws start to develop and expand the settlement but it's clearly not the only area that's growing. When we look post black death we see the impact of that decline and that's very very dramatic. It's a 76% decline at Perthyn. You can see that the village is just, well I mean decimated we'll be putting it mildly because that would be just one in ten and this is much much higher. The village is cut away. Entire streets completely depopulated these areas around here. It's collapsed really probably into a series of isolated cottages or farmsteads. Picking out individual zones, again this area down here is again almost completely disappeared. Rather like at Houghton even into the 16th, 17th, 18th century when recovery occurs we're not seeing that density of population as indicated by the pottery that we saw in the high medieval period. We can see this at other place I mentioned Cotinum already. Here we've got the number of test pits with two more shares drops by 79%. That's suggesting the impact of the difficulties of the 14th century, even greater than the historical evidence has indicated. This is the place where historians have suggested despite the fact that a large proportion of the tenants died in the black death and documented as dying in the black death. There are still abandoned properties recorded in the 16th century. The VCH still suggests that the settlement suffered no overall shrinkage. That of course is because today there is no sign of any shrinkage in Cotinum. It's all built up. What we see here is again a massive decline in the number of pits and whole areas particularly this area up near the church where we've probably got a probably just post conquest settlement laid out over these long narratives probably over ridge and furrow. We can see it's producing high medieval pottery but nothing post medieval, late medieval. Wyverton can be a different area up in North Norfolk near Blakeney of the 23 pits excavated there. The number of pits producing two or more sherds drops from 11 to just four of third of previous levels. We can see the way these settlements are contracting so this is before the black death. We've got a long linear settlement extending for four or five hundred metres up the street here. The church is right in the south end here. It's an isolated settlement up the top there. We can see after the black death this is collapsed back again all of this area collapsing back really to a sort of couple of clusters around the church. These figures are by no means the worst at places like Gayward and Paston. Many of you will know the Paston letters. The drop is around 85%. These are just some examples of devastation on an eye-watering scale. Within settlements would previously have been considered the successful ones, the ones that didn't end up being deserted. Remember these are not the DNVs, not the deserted medieval villages we've been digging in here. Calculated using an index that two or more sherds per pit which may well be producing conservative estimates. This is a graph showing the percentage of excavated pits that are producing high medieval pottery with an average of around about 40% of all of the pits excavated produce two or more sherds of high medieval pottery. This is the graph after the black death. On average 21% of pits produced two or more sherds, roughly half, again that 44% figure coming through. I think what they're really showing is the extent to which our existing maps of late more medieval settlement depopulation and contraction, which continued in many places well into the 17th century, has been underestimated. Because of course we can map this, we can map it at any scale. I've shown you individual settlements, individual streets, individual properties which are depoculated if you like, if not depoculated. Now we've contended the two, one is showing the other, but we can see this as a map here. Here we've got central part of the region, each of these places is one of the places we've dug in. Central part of the region full of these very densely packed settlements. Here's Purthen, that I was just showing you. Houghton is here. This is a bit binnum, it's up here. Wyburton is there, binnum I mentioned is there. This is before the black death and we can see the impact. Just keep your eye on this area, it seems to be so very, very vibrant, successful dynamic. It's also an area where there's a large number of these very poor peasants. Because that's what happens after the black death in the two centuries after that. We can see this area is really very, very badly hit indeed and so indeed is Norfolk. There are a number of interesting phenomena to look at. When we compare it, I've highlighted these sites as green. These are the settlements that actually don't show contraction. I said that 90% of them did. This is a very small percentage, 10% which don't show contraction, which actually grow. Interesting, you can see the area they're in. Thorny, I have to confess I simply don't understand. It's right out in the middle of the fence. There's an abbey there, maybe something going on, I'm not sure. Thorny is confusing. Chedestyn shows, that should be green. Chedestyn grows, but there's a late medieval pottery kiln now which is skewing the evidence. These places though are different and I'll come back to them a bit later. Because what we can do is compare the areas which are suffering the greatest depopulation with the distribution of known deserted medieval villages. Now there are a number of issues around the mapping of deserted settlements, but nonetheless this map shows most of those that have been defined as deserted medieval settlements. So what we can do here is we can put on, this is the area really where you've got the greatest decline in our test pit data leaving out the sort of thorny fenland area which doesn't seem to do too badly and Essex and quite a lot of South East Suffolk which also seems to do much less badly. When we put those two together we can see there's actually really quite a strong correlation and of course when we put all of them together the picture becomes very dynamic. We really are I think only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If we're looking at the distribution of deserted medieval villages we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Now there are a number of observations that I'm just going to make in some of the patterning of this. So I'm going to look at the questions of the relationship between nucleated and desert, sorry that should say dispersed settlement, nucleated versus dispersed settlement, settlement status, urbanism, selective zone, abandonment and regional patterning. So when we look at the impact of deserted settlement this is interesting because we see that the contraction doesn't just affect the nucleated villages and this is significant because for a long time it was assumed that the nucleated villages had been particularly badly impacted by late medieval demographic decline. They were the most tightly packed, most densely inhabited and they had an agrarian farming regime that required a large number of people to work on the land to keep it going with a sort of shared out parcel of land. But we can see when we look at somewhere like clavering for example in Essex again there's a large decline. Now all these outlying places that are producing pottery in the high medieval period, so we see high medieval before the Black Death here are not producing late medieval pottery there at all. All these greens and ends appear to be as badly affected as the heartlands of villages like Pyrton. Overall at clavering there's a decline of 38% using our same 2 plus measure. That decline is fairly grim nearly 40% but not nearly as bad as someone like Carlton Road. You can see the same pattern again. The high medieval compared with the late medieval, the church at Carlton Road incidentally is there which is quite an interesting question at its own right as to why there's some, it's not actually until the post-Black Death period we get any pottery really at all turning up near the church and not really until the post-med that we get any significant amount. But the decline at Carlton Road is 62% and it includes these outlying places, these outlying farms strung out in the landscape that are suffering just as badly as the sort of long straggly settlement in that area. Another phenomenon I was interested in was this question of why do some settlements actually not do as badly. Is there any relationship between the economic base of the settlement, is there some link between the very agricultural base of a lot of the Norfolk settlements and the more urban underpinnings and many of the Suffolk settlements which is sort of renowned as a sort of county of small market towns in the medieval period. Interestingly then we will look at some like Clare, Clare had borough status from at least in the doomsday buckets recorded with burgesses but it sees a decline of 50% so here we see the late Anglo-Saxon period, we see the village growing in the high medieval period and again contracting away with areas left blank there. In Norfolk we see places like Acal and Binham both of which had markets granted for the 13th century. Acal declines by 45% and Binham as you can see here by 71% and that's in spite of the fact that Acal is nestled in the ideal commercial zone if you like between the coast and the major medieval city of Norwich and Binham is very close to the medieval shrine at Walsingham and has a major priory as well of which you can see remains there but as you can see here again you've got dense settlement and almost complete depopulation again this zone depopulation. Another point though is when you look at the settlements that don't decline and ones that do increase there is quite a common theme that most of them do have a broader economic base most of them do have a market role and several of them are heavily involved in the cloth trade so Nailand here for example we can see it appears from nowhere this is the late Anglo-Saxon period but actually nothing going on high medieval period lots and lots of pits producing pottery late medieval period even more pits producing even more pottery Nailand is known to be very heavily involved in the wool trade another place that grows is Longmelford again very heavily involved in the wool trade as was Clare so there is not that it doesn't provide the complete explanation and many of these are research questions for the future to drill down into these and see what factors are affecting how settlements fared now that we've got the basic method that we can find out what the actual trajectory was we can look for causes by comparing different places another pattern that's very noticeable is that when the zoned contraction occurs it very much focuses on it's very frequently see that it's a withdrawal from the most recently engrossed areas the areas that have been most recently taken into use as settlement so I've shown you great Shelford before with the high medieval and high green area very stead and then the shrinkage in these areas but interesting that these are areas this is the Anglo-Saxon pottery these are the areas that are not producing Anglo-Saxon pottery on a particularly high green is clearly a completely new foundation of the high medieval period that seems to be particularly selectively withdrawn from in the late medieval period and we can also see a regional variation in that I've already alluded to the fact that we've got patterning in the decline, the decrease of central Cambridges, North Hartfordshire very badly affected Norfolk very badly affected Essex and Suffolk less so when you look at the county totals though and this is just a very crude sorting by county but you can see the difference so this gives you the total number of pits within each county which varies quite a lot the number less is a significant number for each one the number with two sherds before the black death and afterwards we can see the drop is 51% in Bedfordshire 44% in Cambridges, Cambridges are coming bang on the average there Essex doesn't do quite as badly Hartfordshire does very badly Norfolk does very very badly Suffolk just 12% so there's some really interesting questions to be drilled into as to what's going on here what's causing what what is making some of these places more resilient than others why are people moving into them why are they surviving as going concerns what what is going on now that we can see what's actually happening we can look for the explanations in a more informed way so to conclude we can say I think with confidence that the test pit excavations can reveal quantifiable changes in medieval demography scholarly debate as I said at the beginning of my talk has a surrounding long term impact of the perturbations of the 14th century and its climactic black death has long been hampered by the lack of this standard before and after data but the data presented here do show I think that we can get information that can be both mapped and measured from which is sort of liberating us if you like from the confines of a documentary record that is finite nobody's writing any new medieval documents where if they are making new discovers in terms of medieval archaeology and in many cases the documentary record is entirely absent many of the small places that you've seen on many of these maps the individual streets are not named in medieval documents many of the outlying settlements that you see in some of those dispersed patterns are not we have no knowledge from the documents of who is living now the taxation returns are aggregated up by man and we don't know who's living up we can say I think with some confidence that the pottery using population across the 6th of England was around 45% lower in the centuries after the black death than before pottery is obviously picking up long term sustained changes in population because pottery was carry on and use for a long time but the dramatic difference is very very telling and we can actually say with some confidence that we've got about 45% drop and significantly I think which is really exciting we can actually identify exactly where in the settlement landscape this is happening and we can scale this as well my next job when I have some time and some money is to get all of this information on to a GIS link database because we can then zoom in and out of it and do a lot more in the way of statistical analysis and I think that would be hugely exciting when we get to that stage what's really really exciting though is I think this work shows that there's an almost unlimited reservoir of new evidence still surviving out there you look at a village like Pyrton and you look at the maps I've shown you and you would probably make a mental note never to buy a house there because it's clearly been hollowed out and he's going to suffer terribly from subsidence but actually these are only meter square pits all of those 100 odd pits from Pyrton would fit within a 10 meter by 10 meter trench you could probably fit them within this room it's an immensely economical form of investigation but it's also very adaptable you can fit them in almost anywhere because they're very small and therefore this is an activity that can take place almost anywhere any individual community can actually go out, do some test bit digging and compare its own trajectory, its own fate, how did it do during the black death with these overall figures, with regional figures, with next door neighbours when we were at Pyrton we had a couple of years after we started work at Pyrton the neighbouring village of Shillington wanted to get involved they emailed me we couldn't bring them in at that time and then there was an opportunity to come out with some research council money to do some work in Shillington and one of their main drivers was to see how they'd done compared to Pyrton you can do that you can actually get this data from absolutely anywhere because it's just sitting out there and of course this potential extends well beyond eastern England we've got groups in Leicestershire, in Hampshire, in Derbyshire, up into Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire who are now starting work on this and are producing results which again already can be compared with the East Anglian data it will be very very interesting to see if there's regional variation we've got a good grasp on our benchmarks of what's good, bad and mediocre is it where for East Anglia to get those similar benchmarks the absolute volumes of pottery may well be very different but we can get those similar benchmarks and then compare other places against them from that and of course it's not just an English thing the black death swept across Europe spanned 7000 miles really probably from China to Ireland and this same technique could conceivably be used anywhere Bruce Campbell has been writing recently will be publishing next year I think on the big span of history and how the events of the 14th century the changes of the 14th century actually impacted on East West development since then and I've heard him speak about this and very much looking forward to seeing him getting that into print because these are not events that are locked in the past one thing leads to another as I will produce a clean variation of the alambenic quote from history boys there's no cut off point when things stop having an effect this is a process that affects our lives today affects the communities that we all live in today affects their physical geography their space as it is today and it's potentially actually not just a sort of landscape exercise either it's sobering to consider that the black death which given that with a number of setbacks in the 14th century the black death which it's mass well 44% population decline sustained population decline is a major one is sobering to consider that this was caused by plague we now know that from the DNA analysis this is a disease that is still endemic in some parts of the world and could become a major killer again should resistance antibiotics spread now I've been saying that some time and it's not me that's invented the notion of antibiotics spread this has been reported on from time to time for a long time now by people who are very worried about resistance to antibiotics nowadays should you catch plague it is treatable successfully with antibiotics it was ironic when I woke up this morning to the today program coming on the radio that the second item on the news was yet another story about the spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogens and this is from the BBC's website this morning today with adopters getting increasingly concerned the world is on the cusp of a post antibiotic era finding bacteria resistant to drugs when all of the drugs are being used to cure diseases. So this is not something that's locked in the past I don't want you all to go away terribly worried about this but I do want to highlight that this is not something that's just locked in the past but understanding of these processes and indeed of the resilience because the optimistic take away story is that human civilization didn't collapse actually in the wake of this I hope that our populations in the future should they be faced by something similar can be a big deal. The equally long term resilient not that it wasn't dreadful for most people at the time so thank you very much for listening to me talk about this as I say the main thing I wanted to highlight was that we can now measure this impact and we can do that anywhere thank you very much for this.