Before and after the Black Death: understanding catastrophic and attritional mortality

Despite common associations with plague pits and mass graves, many individuals who succumbed to the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century AD, and to the numerous subsequent outbreaks of plague, were buried in parish cemeteries. This limits the usefulness of contemporaneous cemetery assemblages for the establishment of comparative, non-catastrophic (or ‘attritional’) demographic profiles for medieval populations in Britain. Drawing from three earlier cemeteries, this study reveals similarities in age-at-death and survivorship profiles for adults, offering a characteristic pre-Black Death profile that helps reinforce the distinctiveness of the over-representation of individuals aged 15–24 years among plague burials.