Black Death

Recurrence

An epidemic of plague dies out after a few months because it has no host in which the bacteria can survive. However, that does not mean the infection is not surviving somewhere, in a rodent or flea or warm place, to act as a reservoir, so sooner or later it breaks out again.[64]

The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries.[65] According to Biraben, plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671.[66] The Second Pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667.[67] According to Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to plague in the epidemic of 1628–31."[68]

In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of preincident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300,[69] and a postincident population figure as low as 2 million.[70] By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks occurred in 1361–62, 1369, 1379–83, 1389–93, and throughout the first half of the 15th century.[71] An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the death rate of the plague of 1479–80 could have been as high as 20%.[72] The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.[73]