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Mortality And Meals: The Black Death’S Impact On Diet In England, Jessica Cordova

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper investigates the role of the Black Death in developing England’s eating habits and culinary traditions. The mid-fourteenth century saw a marked change in English cuisine, change that traversed the classes. This change correlates with the timing of the Black Death, an episode of extreme mortality cause by bubonic plague. Notorious as the greatest single source of death across medieval Europe, the Black Death looms in modern minds as an unparalleled tragedy. Between 1348 to 1350, the Black Death swept across Europe and killed between one third and one half of the population. England endured an average of forty …