The Black Death and the Burial of the Dead: What Archaeology Shows

The Black Death is remembered for its terrible toll, and the image of bodies thrown into pits is part of that memory. Archaeologists have dug up the actual cemeteries, and what they found is more complicated, and in some ways more human. This article explains what the evidence shows.

Where were the dead buried?

In emergency cemeteries just outside the city. When the plague reached London in 1348, the ordinary churchyards could not hold the dead. A history article from the University of Oxford explains that Charterhouse Square, outside the city walls, became an official emergency burial ground in 1348. Sir Walter de Manny, who had ties to King Edward III, set it up. A second site, East Smithfield, was founded in late 1348 or early 1349. National Geographic reports that historical documents show the city leased land for emergency graveyards, and dug long trenches for mass burials in advance of epidemics.

Were they just “plague pits”?

No. The Oxford article says archaeological and written evidence shows the Charterhouse burials were part of an organized official response, with individual, ordered graves, not a haphazard dump. East Smithfield is the only large-scale excavation of a proven Black Death cemetery in England. The Museum of London Archaeology describes about 759 burials there, in two distinct areas. They used a mix of well-ordered individual graves and mass burial trenches. A London archaeology report adds that the burials were clustered in three mass burial trenches and 14 rows of graves, and that almost all of the dead were laid on their backs.

Why were there mass graves at all?

Because deaths came faster than burials. Fordham University’s medieval London project says historians believe that as the plague spread and people died at a faster rate, burials were done faster and with less care, which may explain the mass graves. Historical records, according to Medievalists.net, suggest that up to 50,000 people may have been buried in less than three years in one hastily established cemetery in the Farringdon area.

Did people still get religious burials?

Yes, and it mattered a great deal. National Geographic reports that people in 1348 London hoped to receive a “good death,” meaning last rites and burial in consecrated Christian ground, which they believed ensured their place in the afterlife. A researcher quoted there says that for many it was more about burial than getting better. The Oxford article notes that religious and monastic authorities approved the Charterhouse burial site.

What did the countryside look like?

Also grim. It had been assumed that in sparsely populated rural areas, with plenty of open land, people could bury their dead individually. But in 2020, National Geographic reported on a mass grave of four dozen people at Thornton Abbey in England, dated to the 1348–49 outbreak. Researchers found plague DNA in a burial there, the first from the north of England. No grave goods were found with the remains, and the date was pinned down by two silver pennies and two radiocarbon-dated skeletons.

Why does it matter?

The bones help scientists, archaeologists, and historians understand the plague’s causes and its effect on social customs, according to Fordham’s project. And the sites show something about people: even in a catastrophe, communities tried to organize, to mark the place, and to give the dead the rites that mattered to them. For a later example of the same pressures, see How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Overwhelmed American Funerals and Cemeteries. For how the plague shaped art, see The Grim Reaper and the Dance of Death.