Olney Archaeological Society
Tuesday, 5th May 2026 at 10.00 am
Olney Centre, High Street, Olney MK46 4EF
The Black Death was the name given to the bubonic plague that arrived in Europe in the late 1340s. Somewhere between a third and a half of Europe’s population died from the disease.
Speaker: Prof. Mark Bailey, historian, Later Medieval History, University of East Anglia. His recent publications include After the Black Death: Economy, society, and the law in fourteenth-century England (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Serfdom in medieval England: Theory and practice 1200 to 1500 (Manchester University Press, 2025).
A lifelong fascination of his has been the effects of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century on English society, which in 2019 was the subject of his Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford. Important spin offs from that research have been the impact of the pandemic on women’s agency and on the institution of serfdom.
Remote lecturer.
£4.00 visitors.