ABSTRACT
The plague bacillus can go anywhere. But it will travel faster and further in the aggravated conditions known as septicaemic or pneumonic plague, when direct person-to-person infection can take place. Relatively immune from plague, insulated by land surpluses against harvest failure, better fed and better housed than ever before, England's peasant families nevertheless failed to multiply. And where fifteenth-century rural populations came to rest at barely half their pre-plague totals was on a near-perfect balance of births and deaths. In reality, Walden was representative only of the most crowded parts of England. Essex was one of those counties always more liable to plague than the comparatively empty regions of the north. Until the early 1700s plague remained the big killer in East Anglia and the southern Midlands, in the Home Counties and throughout the south-east, whereas famine was still the main cause of exceptional mortalities in Cumbria and northern Lancashire, Northumbria, the North Riding and the Pennine valleys.
