Читать книгу Invasive Aliens: Rabbits, rhododendrons, and the other animals and plants taking over the British Countryside - Dan Eatherley, Dan Eatherley - Страница 11

‘… They saw many kinds of trees and plants and fragrant flowers; they saw birds of many kinds, different from those of Spain, except partridges and nightingales, which sang, and geese, for of these there are a great many there. Four-footed beasts they did not see, except dogs that did not bark.’

The Journal of Christopher Columbus, Tuesday 6 November 1492

In June 1348, a few days before the feast of St John the Baptist, a seaman came ashore at Melcombe Regis on Dorset’s southern coast. Some say he’d been in Bordeaux, others suspected Calais, captured the previous August by King Edward III’s forces. Whatever the truth, he was out of sorts. More than likely he was running a fever and his joints ached. He may have been vomiting. In a day or so, boils in his neck, armpits and groin would swell and erupt in a mess of blood and pus. A week later, the sailor was almost certainly dead. The same fate soon befell others in his crew, and in time much of Melcombe’s populace would follow them to the grave.

The town’s merchants are said to have hushed up the calamity to protect trade in what ranks as one of history’s most brazen cases of ‘business as usual’. But by then the same tragedy was probably playing out at other harbours in southern England, as numerous mercantile and military vessels arrived from the continent, spilling out a cargo of people, goods and the plague. By 15 August, the contagion reached the port of Bristol, dispatching many of its citizens; some are said to have perished within hours of infection. A month or two later London was hit, losing up to half of its citizens. The spring of the following year saw the Midlands and Wales ravaged. By the time the disease abated in September 1350, few corners of mainland Britain had been spared. The poor were worst affected, but the disease killed off the wealthy too: early victims included three Archbishops of Canterbury and the Abbot of Westminster. Almost half of England’s clergy and a quarter of its aristocracy would succumb.

The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis had been knocking around in Eurasia for millennia before strains evolved capable of annihilating humans on a massive scale. The fourteenth-century pandemic, which came to be known as the ‘Black Death’, was not the first of its kind – some 800 years earlier, an outbreak exterminated 30 million across the eastern Roman Empire – but it was among the worst. The variety of Y. pestis responsible emerged in central or eastern Asia during the early 1300s and followed overland trade routes west across the steppes to the Black Sea. In the autumn of 1346, while attacking the Genoese outpost of Kaffa (modern-day Feodosiya) on the Crimean peninsula, Mongols are said to have catapulted infected corpses into the besieged port. The diseased merchants took flight the following spring, carrying the sickness to Constantinople, Pisa, Genoa and Venice. With a foothold in these great trading centres, the plague propagated in all directions. When in 1353 it petered out in Russia, the ‘Great Pestilence’ had slain a third of all humans across the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. And it wasn’t finished: the same plague strain flared up time and again over the next 400 years, famously returning with a vengeance to the seventeenth-century London of Samuel Pepys.

Thanks to records kept by diligent scholars, the route and chronology of the fourteenth-century plague’s initial spread to Europe is well understood. Less certain is how and why it moved at such a pace. To this day Y. pestis is harboured in rats, marmots and many other ground-dwelling rodents, and transmitted between hosts by fleas. While the contagion can also be spread through the air, most modern cases of plague in humans occur when an infected rodent flea goes on to bite someone. One rodent in particular, the ship rat (or black rat), has traditionally been held liable for the devastating promulgation of the Black Death to Britain and the rest of Europe. And for good reason: it loves human company – even if the affection is unrequited – and, as its name suggests, is readily spread by marine vessels. Originating in the Indian subcontinent, ship rats are known to have been in Egypt some 3,000 years ago and reached British shores during the Roman occupation. For some reason the rodent disappears from the archaeological record during the Dark Ages, perhaps suffering from a decline in urbanisation and the cold, wet climate that characterised this period. By the time of the Black Death, however, ship rats and their fleas once again infested trade routes from Cairo to Cardiff. It’s easy to see why the rats get the blame.

But some scholars are dubious, arguing that the rats themselves are as vulnerable as humans to lethal strains of Y. pestis, so make for inefficient carriers. In other words, they would have died from the plague faster than they could have disseminated it. This might explain why modern outbreaks, such as one in Glasgow in 1900, irrefutably caused by rodents and their fleas, seem altogether less catastrophic affairs than the Black Death: just 16 people died in the Glasgow event. An alternative theory now gaining credence is that the fourteenth-century plague was transmitted directly between people via their own human-specific lice and fleas. The idea is supported by recent mathematical simulations of medieval plague outbreaks in nine European cities for which good historical records are available. The research indicates that the pattern of plague transmission better matches spread by human parasites than spread by rats or air. Was the ship rat an innocent bystander all along? If so, we can remove at least one stain from the character of this much-reviled non-native.

What was the longer-term impact of Black Death? Again, there’s much debate. At first, the fear of spreading the contagion curtailed the movement of people, slowing trade and collapsing Europe’s thriving medieval economy. The massive loss of life, particularly among the poor and young, led to a labour shortage, boosting wages and empowering a hitherto subservient workforce; if the lord of the manor ill-treated his few remaining serfs, he could soon see them marching off to a more accommodating master. With a shortage of hands to harvest arable crops, forms of agriculture requiring little human input such as the farming of sheep and rabbits grew in importance, while the countryside emptied. There was a revolution in social mobility, with the lowliest of peasants feeling able to develop their talents and aspire to a higher station in life. People began questioning ancient belief systems as never before.

The plague was at first interpreted as divine punishment, prompting a surge in religious fervour as self-flagellation and other extreme acts of penance took hold. Yet waves of pestilence continued to sweep the land, taking innocent and guilty alike. Priests and other religious figures often bore the brunt as they tended to the sick, heard confessions and administered the last rites; their mortality rates were among the highest of any group. If devotion to God couldn’t save them, what hope was there for everyone else? There’s also the suggestion that the Church’s reputation was further undermined by the lower moral and educational standards of new priests, monks and nuns hastily recruited to fill the vacancies. Faith in a fixed, pre-ordained world eroded, as power ebbed from established structures and new ways of thinking emerged. Human reasoning, values and experiences seemed more useful than religion in interpreting the present, past and future. Thus, the Black Death sowed the seeds of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and a growth of scientific and rational thought which, by the fifteenth century, blossomed into a new age of technologically driven world exploration whose vision and scale would be unprecedented.