ArticleThe Economic history review2019
The 'light touch' of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: an urban trick?
Article in The Economic history review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Urbanization and genetic homogenization in the medieval Low Countries revealed through a ten-century paleogenomic study of the city of Sint-Truiden.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Reduction in grain pollen indicates population decline, but not necessarily Black Death mortality.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Reply to 'Reduction in grain pollen indicates population decline, but not necessarily Black Death mortality'.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Dancing with death. A historical perspective on coping with Covid-19.Risk, hazards & crisis in public policy · 2021Article
- Mortality and demographic recovery in early post-black death epidemics: Role of recent emigrants in medieval Dijon.PloS one · 2020Article
- Climate and society in long-term perspective: Opportunities and pitfalls in the use of historical datasets.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Climate changeReview
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Abstract
Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a 'light touch' of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Black Death was severe, perhaps no less severe than other parts of western Europe; that serious plagues continued throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and that the Black Death and recurring plagues spread over vast territories-including the countryside. The previous conception of a 'light touch' of plague in the Low Countries was created by the overprivileging of particular urban sources, and a failure to account for the rapid replenishment of cities via inward migration, which obscured demographic decimation. We suggest that the population of the Low Countries may not have recovered faster than other parts of western Europe but instead experienced a greater degree of post-plague rural-urban migration.
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