Today, with memories of the Covid19 Pandemic still raw and news alerts popping up on our phones 24/7, usually with horrendous headlines, it can feel like we’re living through the most dangerous part of the human timeline right now, says Pat Kinsella. And maybe we are...
Extreme weather events are happening with alarming regularity, and multiple mutually antagonistic nations, sitting on arsenals of thermonuclear weapons that could eliminate all life on Planet Earth several times over, are dissuaded from using them only by a notion literally known as MAD (mutual assured destruction), a concept that relies entirely on those in power being both sane and reasonable.
- Mega volcanoes, asteroid impacts and global cooling: The five deadly mass extinctions that changed life on Earth as we know it forever
- Plague, pox and pain: The deadliest medieval diseases that changed history forever
Anyway…to distract you from dwelling on such cheery thoughts, we’ve compiled a list of earlier epochs when – with the benefit of hindsight – we can say for sure that danger levels in Britain were sky high.
The deadliest times to be alive
Dark Age Disasters 536AD
Dr Michael McCormick, Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University, has zeroed in on a several decades–long period starting with the year 536 AD as the absolute worst time to be alive for most people on the planet.
A series of cataclysmic natural events combined to cause no end of trauma during this time, beginning with a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland that spewed enough ash into the atmosphere to block out the sun right across the Northern Hemisphere and usher in the Late Antique Little Ice Age.
Temperatures plummeted by as much as 2.5°C, crops failed and people starved in large numbers. On top of that, disease ripped across Europe and Asia from 541; the Plague of Justinian (named after Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, who caught but survived it) caused between 25 and 50 million deaths and wiped out up to half the population of the Byzantium Empire.
More massive volcanic eruptions occurred (likely in central and North America) in 540 and 547. These were global disasters (China lost up to 85% of its population), but it's safe to say people in Britain had a pretty terrible time of it too – written records are scant because the country was right in the middle of the Dark Ages (a period of turmoil and conflict between the departure of the Romans in 407 AD and the establishment of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms in the late 6th century) but evidence from tree trunks reveals a time of gloom and doom.
The Great Famine of 1315–17
Diabolically wet weather caused havoc across Northern Europe in the second decade of the 14th century, but England was especially badly hit when, in 1316, the harvest failed for the second year in a row, causing widespread hunger and starvation.
The rain continued, hampering efforts to grow more crops, and the wet and cold conditions caused illnesses such as pneumonia, bronchitis and tuberculosis, which claimed many more lives.The price of food soared (wheat went up by 320%) and a fast-spreading disease killed massive numbers of cattle and sheep across the country, compounding the disaster.
Exact records were not kept, but it's estimated that many cities and towns across the country had a fatality rate of between 10 and 25%. Lawlessness was rife and the situation was so severe there were reports of cannibalism and infanticide. Even the king went hungry on at least one occasion – there’s an account of Edward II stopping at St Albans on 10 August 1315, and being unable to find any food for himself and his entourage. Food levels didn't not return to normal until at least 1325.
The Black Death, 1346–53
The 14th century was no fun for anyone. Just two decades after the Great Famine, a terrible wave of bubonic plague swept across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
This was another global disaster, with estimates of the number of deaths worldwide ranging from 50 to 200 million, and between 30 and 60% of the population of Europe succumbing to the disease. The plague came into Europe via the Crimea, where the Mongol Golden Horde army apparently catapulted infected bodies into the port city of Kaffa (Feodosia), which they were besieging.
The disease raced across the continent very quickly, reaching England by June 1348, from where it speedily spread throughout the British Isles. Carried by rats and highly contagious, the plague caused people to develop a raging fever, sprout puss-filled buboes around the groin, neck and armpits, suffer blackening of the skin (hence the name Black Death) and start vomiting blood.
Most victims died within days of contracting the disease, and attempts to cure it were often as bad (and fatal) as the ailment itself. Certain groups within society, including Jews and lepers, were blamed for the plague and persecuted. About half of London's occupants died from the disease, and Europe's population didn't recover until the 16th century.
We named the Black Death one of the world's deadliest zoonotic diseases
Reign of the witch-hunter king, 1567–1625
Risk is relative. Some perils, such as plague and pestilence, do not discriminate, threatening everyone (almost) equally, but other dangers specifically menace certain sections of society.
Poor people can’t escape famine as easily as rich folk can, and men die in much greater numbers during times of war, but women in medieval Europe were nearly 100% more likely to be accused of witchcraft and killed than any male (not to mention the fact that for the vast majority of human history adult women have been at huge risk of dying in childbirth).
Between 1450 and 1750, virulent witch hunts were conducted across Europe, with around 100,000 people (overwhelmingly women) arrested and put through ludicrous trials, and around half being found guilty and executed in excruciatingly painful ways. One of the most dangerous eras to be a woman in Britain was during the time of James VI and I.
Initially Scotland was the epicentre of such persecution, with around 4000 women burned at the stake and notorious cases such as the North Berwick witch trials in 1590. In 1597, as King James VI of Scotland, the witch-obsessed monarch personally wrote and published Daemonologie, a treatise on witchcraft, and in 1604 – after becoming James I of a kingdom that spanned Scotland, England and Ireland – he pushed through the Witchcraft Act, which made hanging mandatory for anyone convicted of witchcraft, no matter how minor their alleged offence.
It's no co-incidence that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around this time, a play where the evil influence of witches features large.
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English Civil Wars 1642–51
In the mid 17th century, violent conflict erupted in Britain between Royalists, supporters of Charles I and his ‘divine-right’ style of absolute monarchy, and Parliamentarians looking for more constitutional power and to thwart the potential of a reversal of the English Reformation and the return of Catholicism.
Although commonly known as the English Civil War, three distinct but interconnected wars were actually contested between 1642 and 1651, with fighting taking place in England, Ireland, and Scotland, so the conflict is more accurately referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
This was a time of great uncertainty for the entire population of Britain and Ireland: King Charles I was overthrown, tried and beheaded, England briefly became a republic (while Scotland remained a monarchy) and the structure of society fundamentally changed.
Around 25% of adult men in England and Wales were directly involved in the fighting, and an estimated 85,000 to 100,000 of them were killed. It's thought a further 100,000 non-combatants died as a result of the wars, mostly from diseases like typhus, dysentery and plague, which were spread by troops. As a proportion of the population, this was higher than the casualty rate suffered in WWI.
Black Death II, 1665
Barely a decade after the Civil War carnage came to an end, the bubonic plague (which had never really gone away) reared its head again big time. Initially the epidemic was more localised, hitting the poor folk crammed into the overcrowded parish of St Giles-in-the-Field in London, but soon the spectre of pestilence was rampaging across the capital and beyond (to places such as York).
An estimated 70,000 Londoners (15% of the city's population) perished in the stinking summer of 1665, and the outbreak was only really brought under control by an event that would otherwise have been regarded as a complete disaster: the Great Fire of London in 1666. Around four-fifths of London's buildings were destroyed in the inferno, and while it's claimed only six people lost their lives in the flames, many historians believe the real total was much higher, and certainly thousands were made homeless.
The Year without a Summer, 1816
Happily, 1815 saw the end of the Napoleonic Wars (which had embroiled multiple nations for 12 years and had resulted in some 6 million lives lost overall, including 300,000 British deaths), but sadly, nature was not ready for people live in safety and security.
In April, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) went bang, in the biggest volcanic eruption seen on the Earth since 536 AD (see above). Mount Mayon in the Philippines had erupted the previous year, and the combined effect of all the gasses and ashes that ended up in the atmosphere plunged large parts of the planet into darkness.
Known as the 'Year without a Summer', the gloom of 1816 prompted Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, but an all-too-real horror story was unfolding across continental Europe, Britain and Ireland, as temperatures fell dramatically and crops failed.
Famine hit Ireland, food prices escalated dramatically across Britain and Europe, starvation loomed and the already war-scarred population began rioting. A typhus epidemic broke out, hitting Scotland and Ireland especially badly, with 65,000 people dying in Ireland alone.
The sky remained hazy for several years (as seen in many Turner paintings), and a lack of oats to feed horses led to alternative transport methods being explored, resulting in the invention of what became the bicycle.
The Great Hunger 1845–52
In the mid-19th century a blight devastated potato crops right across Europe, with the most terrible effects being felt in Ireland, where the general population had become almost entirely dependent on the potato as a food source.
At the time, the entirety of Ireland was politically part of Britain, and although alternative crops such as grain were being grown on the island by wealthy protestant landowners, this life-saving food was continually shipped to England, leaving the poor catholic Irish population to starve to death or attempt to escape on 'famine ships' to Britain, the United States and Canada.
During this period, a million people died and over a million more left Ireland, leading to a steady stream of emigration that lasted decades. The potato famine reduced Ireland's population (8.5 million in 1841) by almost 50%, from where it has never fully recovered, and the Whig government's handling of the disaster (which largely amounted to ignoring it) cemented anti-English sentiment for generations (and transported it around the globe). But the famine didn't just hit Ireland, it was also felt in the Scottish Highlands (where thousands died and the population was reduced by a third) and elsewhere, contributing to civil unrest that stoked the European Revolutions of 1848.
Great Influenza, 1918–20
Just as the international nightmare of the First World War was coming to a close – a conflict that had caused the deaths of 16 million soldiers and civilians, including around a million people from Britain – the punch-drunk planet was absolutely clattered by an outbreak of influenza, which has (completely unfairly) gone down in history as the Spanish Flu.
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The first documented case of the extremely contagious and dangerous H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus that caused the 'Great Influenza' outbreak, was actually in Kansas, in the United States, in March 2018. It was detected in mainland Europe and the United Kingdom within a month, and was soon savaging the world, spread by the movement of troops. News about the epidemic (and attempts to mitigate its spread) were hampered by the censorship that was still in place during the tail end of the war. Early on it was mainly reported in newspapers in neutral Spain, which led people to incorrectly assume it had originated there (resulting in the misleading name 'Spanish Flu').
A particularly virulent strain of the influenza virus, it infected as many as 500 million people worldwide and hit young folk much harder than most flu types, resulting in a huge number of deaths. Global numbers vary wildly, from 17 to 100 million, but it certainly killed 228,000 people in Britain in 1918–19, and was the worst pandemic in modern history.
The Blitz September, 1940–May 1941
The body count in WWI was horribly high, but sadly it did not turn out to be the war to end all wars. In fact, the seeds for the 20th Century’s second round of hostilities were arguably sewn at Versailles, embedded in the terms of the settlement that punished Germany and carved Europe up amongst the victors. Twenty years after the Treaty was inked, the world went to war again, and this time the bombs and bloodshed wasn't so restricted to the battlefields.
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- Once home to Nazi prisoners: The grim reality of life inside one of Britain's former WW2 prisoner of war camps.
As the conflict worsened, huge quantities of high explosives were dropped on civilian targets on both sides, flattening cities and killing thousands of non-combatants. The Blitz, which began on 7 September 1940 and lasted for 8 months, saw the German Luftwaffe bomb British cities intensely to try and damage manufacturing capacity and demoralise the population. London was the main target (the capital was bombed 56 out of first 57 days of the Blitz), but industrial centres such as Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Sheffield were hit badly too, as were port cities like Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, Sunderland and Swansea. Over 40,000 British civilians were killed during bombing raids throughout the war.
