The Black Death was worse in towns and cities. London, the biggest city in Britain, obviously had most deaths. Two hundred people per day were dying at the peak of the plague. By then they were not being buried in coffins. The bodies were just tipped into huge pits. Two new cemeteries had to be made outside the city.
People were used to death in the Middle Ages. Babies often died, people were old at 45 and a poor harvest meant starvation. But the Black Death was far worse.
The Italian poet, Boccaccio, described how people behaved.
"Some shut themselves away and waited for death, others rioted from tavern to tavern. The sickness fell upon all classes without distinction. The rich passed out of this world without a single person to comfort them. The poor fell sick by the thousand and most of them died. The terror was such that brother even fled from brother, wife from husband, yea the mother from her own child."
It is difficult to know exactly how many died. Nowadays every death has to be registered. There were no such registers in the Middle Ages. How can historians find out? The Church was the only organisation to keep accurate records. Bishops noted down when a new priest was appointed to a parish church. In many areas half the churches had new priests in 1348 or 1349. In some monasteries nearly all the monks died. Probably the death rate in the Church was particularly high.
Priests visited the sick to comfort them, so were likely to catch the plague. Once the Black Death got into a monastery it would easily spread to all the monks. We know from church records that three out seven clergymen in the bishopric of Westminster died in the first half of 1349. Both rich and poor perished. Among the well-of was John Strattford, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Historians estimate that about one third or more of the poulation of England and Wales died. This would be over one million people.