While ravaging the Norman kingdom, the Black Death did not spare any corner of Europe, and even extended its claws to Europe's close neighbors - the Middle East and North Africa. By 1043, it had swept through Spain, Greece, Italy, France, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine.

The West Road: Brought into the Iberian Peninsula by a pilgrim returning to Santiago from Palestine, in Barcelona, Aragon, Navarra and Castile in eastern and central Spain, more than 30,000 people died. And the illustrious King of Aragon, Ramillo. Jimena also died of the plague.

Northwest Road: Northbound through Bordeaux, into the plains of northwestern France, and from the Norman kingdom south into the northwestern and central core of France, the population of the city-state of Flanders dropped by one-fifth, and the most serious was that more than half of the population died directly in Bruges, and no more than 6,000 people remained in the city, plus the scattered inhabitants.

Northeast Road: Introduced to the Holy Roman Empire via Austria, 11,000 people died in Erfurt, 10,000 in Münster, and 5,000 in Mainz, all equivalent to more than a third of their citizens at the time.

What is even more frightening is that the plague is spreading faster and faster in Europe, probably due to the gradual increase in population density. By the end of 1043, the entire European continent was spared. At this time, only the British Isles and Scandinavia, which were blocked by the English Channel, could temporarily survive and survive.

However, in the spring of 1044, the Black Death suddenly entered Kent in England from Calais in the Norman kingdom. Upon hearing the report, the terrified King of England, Edward the Confessor, heeded the advice of the royal physician and ordered a ban on fishing throughout the country and attempted to blockade Kent and the surrounding area.

But even this could not stop the invasion of the plague. Soon, the Black Death spread to Great Britain at an unprecedented rate, and spread rapidly throughout England, even to the smallest villages. In rural England, the labour force was greatly reduced, and in some estates, tenant farmers died altogether. And the situation in the city is even worse because of the dense population. By May, only 30,000 of London's original 50,000 inhabitants remained, and it was not until the 13th century that the original number was restored.

By the time the epidemic was brought under control in 1046, the British Isles and Ireland had lost about 40% of their total population, which was much higher than their total losses during the Viking invasion of England over the centuries.

In May 1045, an English merchant ship sailed across the ocean and brought the Black Death to the Kingdom of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in Scandinavia, and then to Germany and northern Poland in eastern Europe, and even the Archduchy of Novgorod, the easternmost point of Europe.

In this way, almost every corner of Europe was wiped out by the Black Death, and no one could escape the threat of death wherever the plague went, regardless of class or class. The numbers are shocking evidence of this cruelty. In Marseille, France, 48,000 people died from the plague; In Perpignan, only one of the city's only nine doctors survived; The situation was even worse in Avignon, where 6,000 houses had been left empty by the plague; A church in Paris processed 384 wills in nine months, a 40-fold increase from before the outbreak of the plague.

At the end of 1044, when the Black Death spread to the heart of Germany and Austria, thousands of lives were immediately consumed. Vienna once killed 826 people in a single day, and a third of the clergy of the Holy Roman Empire were killed, leaving many churches and monasteries unsustainable.

The Black Death swept away almost every corner of Europe, and no one escaped the threat of death wherever the plague went, regardless of class or class.

After a series of plague blows, the population of Europe died massively. As for the exact number of deaths, it is impossible to calculate them because of the lack of accurate statistics, but in the case of France, nearly a third of the population of Europe was swallowed up by the Black Death, at least more than 10 million people. Even in the 300 years after the 11th century, the Black Death was not extinct, and its horrors were only matched by the two world wars of the 20th century.

The most direct impact of the Black Death on society was two words: paralysis, stagnation of trade, inflation, and skyrocketing prices of daily necessities, and the Norman and French kingdoms, which were fighting each other, had to negotiate a ceasefire in early 1044, because there were not enough able-bodied men to replenish the army, and the allies of Spain and England were also affected by the Black Death, and the war could not be fought at all.

The social and economic order in Europe also changed as a result of the pandemic.

In the Middle Ages, the lords' land was cultivated by their serfs. The serfs and their families lived in small villages made of thatched huts made of reeds, turf and mud. Usually, there are two huts, one for people and one for livestock; The floor of the house was covered with leaves and hay, and a platform for a bonfire was made of stones in the middle of the house.

Because there were no windows or chimneys, smoke from fires was released through holes in the roof or open doors. The only furniture in the room was a simple table, a few stools, a storage box, and a bed made of a few large wooden planks. Next to each hut there was half an acre of self-reserved land, plus chicken and pig pens, ducks and geese were kept in the nearby creek, and the manure of people and livestock was used as fertilizer; Large arable animals such as horses and cattle were shared by the entire village, which was basically what rural Europe looked like in the Middle Ages.

Most of these medieval villages were built around a large plot of land, which was owned by the lords, who were responsible for the cultivation by serfs, and who lived in large estates with defensive functions. The serfs toiled for their lords, their own food and clothing were uncertain, and the amount of their annual taxes was sometimes determined only by the whims of the lords, who ruled over the justice of these poor illiterate peasants, and ruled their fate.

This feudal manor system slowly disintegrated as money replaced labor services, especially in the economically developed city of Normandy. In practice, money was used instead of labor to pay taxes, and the serfs paid a certain amount of rent to the lords.

But with a significant number of peasants wiped out from the Black Death, the lords had only two options if they did not want their land to be wasted: they hired labor at a high price, or rented the land to surviving peasants in neighboring villages or towns.

Because of the lack of labor, the lords realized that they would not have any income without labor, so they came up with a new method: the land was still owned by them, but now they hired full-time stewards to manage the land and collect taxes, so that the peasants who paid the taxes became tenant farmers on the lord's land.

As disease and death further drained the labour pool, tenant farmers had to recruit people to help with the work, coming from landless displaced people and those who survived in the towns. In this way, the land of the lords was cultivated by tenant farmers and jobless vagrants, and over time, the nature of the feudal manor system changed.