Mortality and structure

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的essay代写范文 -- Mortality and structure，文章讲述然而，黑死病的社会经济影响源于突然死亡，其规模之大令人震惊，无论由何种杆菌引起。要评估鼠疫的经济意义，首先要确定1347-53年首次袭击的死亡率，以及在中世纪时期其复发的频发率，然后阐明鼠疫如何根据年龄，性别，富裕程度和地点来选择受害者。

Mortality and structure
The Black Death’s socioeconomic impact stemmed, however, from sudden mortality on a staggering scale, regardless of what bacillus caused it. Assessment of the plague’s economic significance begins with determining the rate of mortality for the initial onslaught in 1347—53 and its frequent recurrences for the balance of the Middle Ages, then unraveling how the plague chose victims according to age, sex, affluence, and place.
Imperfect evidence unfortunately hampers knowing precisely who and how many perished. Many of the Black Death’s contemporary observers, living in an epoch of famine and political, military, and spiritual turmoil, described the plague apocalyptically. A chronicler famously closed his narrative with empty membranes should anyone survive to continue it. Others believed as few as one in ten survived. One writer claimed that only fourteen people were spared in London. Although sober eyewitnesses offered more plausible figures, in light of the medieval preference for narrative dramatic force over numerical veracity, chroniclers’ estimates are considered evidence of the Black Death’s battering of the medieval psyche, not an accurate barometer of its demographic toll.
Even non—narrative and presumably dispassionate, systematic evidence — legal and governmental documents, ecclesiastical records, commercial archives — presents challenges. No medieval scribe dragged his quill across parchment for the demographer’s pleasure and convenience. With a paucity of censuses, estimates of population and tracing of demographic trends have often relied on indirect indicators of demographic change (e.g., activity in the land market, levels of rents and wages, size of peasant holdings) or evidence treating only a segment of the population (e.g., assignment of new priests to vacant churches, payments by peasants to take over holdings of the deceased). Even the rare census—like record, like England’s Domesday Book (1086) or the Poll Tax Return (1377), either enumerates only heads of households or excludes slices of the populace or ignores regions or some combination of all these. To compensate for these imperfections, the demographer relies on potentially debatable assumptions about the size of the medieval household, the representativeness of a discrete group of people, the density of settlement in an undocumented region, the level of tax evasion, and so forth.
A bewildering array of estimates for mortality from the plague of 1347—53 is the result. The first outbreak of the Black Death indisputably was the deadliest but the death rate varied widely according to place and social stratum. National estimates of mortality for England, where the evidence is fullest, range from five percent, to 23.6 percent among aristocrats holding land from the king, to forty to forty—five percent of the kingdom’s clergy, to over sixty percent in a recent estimate. The picture for the continent likewise is varied. Regional mortality in Languedoc (France) was forty to fifty percent while sixty to eighty percent of Tuscans (Italy) perished. Urban death rates were mostly higher but no less disparate, e.g., half in Orvieto (Italy), Siena (Italy), and Volterra (Italy), fifty to sixty—six percent in Hamburg (Germany), fifty—eight to sixty—eight percent in Perpignan (France), sixty percent for Barcelona’s (Spain) clerical population, and seventy percent in Bremen (Germany). The Black Death was often highly arbitrary in how it killed in a narrow locale, which no doubt broadened the spectrum of mortality rates. Two of Durham Cathedral Priory’s manors, for instance, had respective death rates of twenty—one and seventy—eighty percent (Shrewsbury, 1970; Russell, 1948; Waugh, 1991; Ziegler, 1969; Benedictow, 2004; Le Roy Ladurie, 1976; Bowsky, 1964; Pounds, 1974; Emery, 1967; Gyug, 1983; Aberth, 1995; Lomas, 1989).
Credible death rates between one quarter and three quarters complicate reaching a Europe—wide figure. Neither a casual and unscientific averaging of available estimates to arrive at a probably misleading composite death rate nor a timid placing of mortality somewhere between one and two thirds is especially illuminating. Scholars confronting the problem’s complexity before venturing estimates once favored one third as a reasonable aggregate death rate. Since the early 1970s demographers have found higher levels of mortality plausible and European mortality of one half is considered defensible, a figure not too distant from less fanciful contemporary observations.
While the Black Death of 1347—53 inflicted demographic carnage, had it been an isolated event European population might have recovered to its former level in a generation or two and its economic impact would have been moderate. The disease’s long—term demographic and socioeconomic legacy arose from it recurrence. When both national and local epidemics are taken into account, England endured thirty plague years between 1351 and 1485, a pattern mirrored on the continent, where Perugia was struck nineteen times and Hamburg, Cologne, and Nuremburg at least ten times each in the fifteenth century. Deadliness of outbreaks declined — perhaps ten to twenty percent in the second plague (pestis secunda) of 1361—2, ten to fifteen percent in the third plague (pestis tertia) of 1369, and as low as five and rarely above ten percent thereafter — and became more localized; however, the Black Death’s persistence ensured that demographic recovery would be slow and socioeconomic consequences deeper. Europe’s population in 1430 may have been fifty to seventy—five percent lower than in 1290 (Cipolla, 1994; Gottfried, 1983).
Enumeration of corpses does not adequately reflect the Black Death’s demographic impact. Who perished was equally significant as how many; in other words, the structure of mortality influenced the time and rate of demographic recovery. The plague’s preference for urbanite over peasant, man over woman, poor over affluent, and, perhaps most significantly, young over mature shaped its demographic toll. Eyewitnesses so universally reported disproportionate death among the young in the plague’s initial recurrence (1361—2) that it became known as the Childen’s Plague (pestis puerorum, mortalité des enfants). If this preference for youth reflected natural resistance to the disease among plague survivors, the Black Death may have ultimately resembled a lower—mortality childhood disease, a reality that magnified both its demographic and psychological impact.
The Black Death pushed Europe into a long—term demographic trough. Notwithstanding anecdotal reports of nearly universal pregnancy of women in the wake of the magna pestilencia, demographic stagnancy characterized the rest of the Middle Ages. Population growth recommenced at different times in different places but rarely earlier than the second half of the fifteenth century and in many places not until c. 1550.
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