ABSTRACT
For better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, English society changed at the Black Death. Nobody now denies the Black Deaths status as a defining moment in late-medieval English history. But there are good reasons to tread cautiously all the same. It was famine not plague, after 1349 that remained biggest killer in the colder, wetter and emptier northern counties. In those counties also, extended families lived on longer; while even in southern England, the Black Deaths successor plagues may always have come second in population control to the growing practice of late marriage with fewer children. When Purgatory ceased to threaten, as it did at the Reformation, and when, as late as 1700, the risks of an untimely death by plague subsided also, mortality subjects lost much of their appeal. Yet long before Harington coined his aphorism, violence had given way to talking in post-plague England, being arguably the main achievement of royal governments.
