How an Overlooked Eruption May Have Sparked the Black Death

I assumed from your post and previous ones that you are very knowledgeable on this subject. I just wanted to clarify with the last chart that for those here who still believe that “climate change” is actually some sort of crisis. In reality the crisis is the rate of spending on inefficient and unreliable sources of energy for electricity and transportation.

The source of plague in the “Plague Village” of Eyam in Derbyshire is believed to be from imported cloth contaminated with fleas.
https://www.eyamvillage.org.uk

Looking at the chart without explicit date points makes guessing difficult. But, if the last 4 high red lines end in 2024 or 2025, then that could indicate a Tonga eruption effect. This could be dropping based on the last line. More information in a few years.

Wow! Looks like climate change makes volcanoes erupt! (/s)

Thank you.

It’s an old trick in plotting to hyperfocus on a narrow segment of the y-axis. When that occurs, there SHOULD be two hash marks on they-axis near the origin.

Appreciate that info. Back then, transport of cloth, anything was not rapid-— took months. So, if it was fleas in the cloth, what were they eating? Fleas obligate blood suckers,maybe even back then they could eat crumbs or plant debris. Fairly sure that all this time, it has been... blood.

So, it was most likely rats feeding their fellow traveling fleas.

The Volcano that caused the Plague??? Surely not. Well this week we look at some new research that explains how its almost certainly the case thata Volvano caused the Black Death. Welcoem to this weeks mystery. A gorgeous sunny day as we venture across the south downs showing you some great examples of medieval villages that suffered from this fate.
The Black Death Never Made Sense - Until Now | 9:01
Paul Whitewick | 230K subscribers | 63,743 views | March 1, 2026

Transcript
Have a look at this really beautiful church, St. Leonard's. It's been here for nearly a thousand years in this very place. There's something really curious about this church. And we'll see it if we step slightly away from the church, head to an old gate that leads to nowhere. And that is the point. If we look in that direction, that direction, that direction, where this church seems to serve nothing for miles. But that all changes if we head just over there through the gate. Come and have a look at this.

So, we have just there the church 100 yards or so behind the camera. And here we have a seemingly random field to the north. But it's not random. It is full of lumps and bumps. We have platforms for houses. We have street grids lined out. This is a deserted medieval village that of Hartley Mauditt. And it was gone in a true sense soon after 1350. Remember that date because before this it was a fully functional settlement. Now, this is consistent with what we see across southern Britain and beyond the Black Death.

However, we see this pattern in numerous places, the medieval villages lost to the plague. But what if I told you that these places weren't just abandoned because of disease? What if I told you these places were abandoned and lost forever because of something that happened half a world away and they had absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever? Welcome to the story of how a volcano caused the Black Death.

A top this hill in the beautiful South Downs where this little church has been standing there for around a thousand years. Long before modern roads and technology and home comforts we have today, people were already worshiping here. This is St. Hubert's Idsworth here in the really beautiful South Downs. And what makes this place so remarkable is not how long it's been here and not the surreal surroundings. It's what's inside.

Okay, so what a beautiful setting this is. What a treat this church is. But crucially, it's not the setting that's important because look at the end here. We have some medieval paintings which are crucial to this story because they were painted in the mid-14th century. And one of them, that one there, I think depicts St. Christopher. And well, if you were to see this image, it said that you would be protected from sudden death. And if all of a sudden we put the dates together, that and the time the Black Death arrived here. Well, all of a sudden that painting adds up.

People came here potentially carrying fear and uncertainty and almost certainly loss. They didn't understand what was happening. They only knew that death had become very unpredictable. So if we were to step back outside of the church and try and find the village, the community and the people and the lives that this church once served, well, they're long gone. To understand what really happened here and all the other abandoned medieval villages at the time, well, we need to look at forces far bigger than what the medieval people here would have ever seen.

So a team of professors from the University of Cambridge wanted to understand more about the Black Death. How it moved, how it arrived here in Britain, how it moved across the globe. And of course to do that, well, they needed to stop thinking about places like this at a very small village scale. And of course, think about a global scale instead.

In the years before the Black Death reached Europe, something changed in the atmosphere. Tree ring records across the northern hemisphere show a sudden sustained cooling in the 1340s. The signal appears again and again across regions that had nothing else in common. Add to that the ice caused layers of sulfur appear locked into the ice pointing at a major injection of volcanic aerosols into the stratosphere. The scale of that is hugely important. That combination of widespread cooling and sulfur aerosols is consistent with a powerful volcanic eruption occurring somewhere near the equator.

The exact volcano isn't known. The exact location isn't known whether it was one, whether it was a set of volcanoes. No medieval chronicler here would have attributed the two things. But now we have those timing sort of locked in there because we have these records. Well, all of a sudden that timing becomes critical because now we have these two separate things. We have those eruptions and those shifts in the climate directly before we see the Black Death start to work its way through Britain. And now the question becomes exactly how are we tying these two events together? The answer came from an unexpected place.

So this is Prior's Dean. Very small hamlet. There's one house there, an industrial building here, and of course, a church right in front of me. And if you want to know how old or how long people have been worshiping in a certain place, well, a good idea is to take a look at the yew tree in the grounds. Now, if that isn't over a thousand years old, I don't know what is.

Now, as you've probably guessed, well, this place once held a very old medieval settlement. There's earthworks just across the way there. But have a look at this. Like many villages in southern England, Prior's Dean ends in the later Middle Ages. And when we look at places like this, a temptation is to search for a single moment or a clear cause, a visible disaster. But the first sign of what is coming doesn't appear just yet in these villages. It appears in the climate.

Disappointingly, we're all locked up. A few gems in here I really wanted to show you, but sadly not today. Consecutive blue rings show cold, wet summers: 1345, 1346, and 1347. Now, a single year is common, but three in a row is extremely unusual. And with that, an eruption powerful enough to alter global climate patterns, and then cooler, wetter conditions follow, harvests become much less reliable. And food systems that are already near the edge, well, they begin to strain a lot more. And crucially, trade routes respond. And this is key because now we start to see movement increasing along these corridors.

Grain import to the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa from north of the Black Sea and beyond in 1347. Add to this we have entire written records which when placed together really start to tell a story and add up. Just pause here and read some of these. Ships that carried grain across the Black Sea would have almost certainly been infected with the plague. But we already knew that. But what we now know, what we have a much better picture of is why that grain was needed so urgently.

By the time disease begins to appear in the European ports, the conditions that allow it to travel and take hold are already very much in place. Places like this, well, they record the outcome sometimes in a really horrific way. I remember reading some parish records once of a time like this and the vicar had written a very dark time. And perhaps now we understand that a bit better. Maybe he wasn't just talking metaphorically.

Now, those places in Italy that we get some of this text information from, well, they don't seem to suffer too long from this. They stop importing grain. Perhaps they weren't hit as hard as some other places in Europe, including here. But the wheels of that new globalization were already in place. June 1348, the Black Death was said to arrive. It arrived into a country already shaped by failed harvests, weakened communities, and rising movement of people and goods.

What followed was far from uniform. Some towns recovered. Some regions adapted, but so many rural communities never did. Villages here, certainly in Britain, well, they fell below the threshold they needed to survive. And we shouldn't say necessarily there's an absolute direct cause and effect, but certainly what we're seeing here, it seems on the evidence that we have, this was a global problem that became very much a local one. A volcanic eruption thousands of miles away altered climate patterns and that climate reshaped harvest and trade and trade carried disease. And here in the quiet English fields, the consequences settled into the ground.

So I think places like this are really good because despite serving no one, this place exists and it holds this memory with all its features, the earthworks out the back of the abandoned village, all the wonderful medieval features within that church there, they hold this memory of all these abandoned places and perhaps now with this new research from the University of Cambridge and there on, well now we have a little bit more context to the story of these places.

I've been Paul. If you've enjoyed this and you want to help support the channel, we do have a Patreon and a YouTube members where we offer you behind the scenes and Discord groups and all sorts of bits and pieces like that. If not, just carry on watching, click subscribe, and we'll see you this time next week.