King Henry VIII School - The Black Death

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    KHS History Department

    Quiz on the Black Death!

    In 1347 Black Death struck, killing thousands of people.
    The symptoms were horrible:

  • Boils oozing blood and pus would appear in your groin
  • More boils would appear in your armpits
  • Purple-black spots covered your body
  • You smelled horrible
  • You would spit blood

    • In three days you would be dead.

    The Black Death was actually the Bubonic Plague.

    So many people died of it that bodies were piled high onto carts and dropped into pits or thrown into rivers.

    Children were more likely to get the Black Death than adults and some people claimed that this was God's revenge on them for not going to church or for being horrible to their parents!

    Doctors didn't know what caused the plague and as a result didn't know how to cure it. Many people believed you could catch it by looking at a victim, drinking water or breathing bad air and they invented a lot of strange cures...

    Wear a magpie's beak around the neck
    Cut a hole in the skull to let out the devil
    Throw a sweet smelling herb on the fire (to clean the air)
    Drink a medicine of ten-year-old treacle
    Sit in a sewer so that the bad air of the plague is driven off by the worse air of the sewer!
    Swallow a powder made of crushed emeralds(expensive!)
    Eat (v. poisonous) arsenic powder
    Let some blood out of your body
    Kill all the cats and dogs in town
    Shave a live chicken's bottom and strap it to the plague sore
    Cut a live pigeon in half and rub it on your boil
    March from town to town whipping yourself
    Click here for the assignment sheet.