The Black Death - mass burials

Many people stay in their houses hoping to be safe from the pestilence. They fall sick in their thousands and because of fear they receive no care or attention so most of them die. Bodies are placed outside their front doors in the morning awaiting collection, and sometimes if all have died in the house it’s only when the smell of their rotting bodies alerts their neighbours that they are removed and this is not out of compassion you understand, but only to get rid of the stench. So many of the poor die in the streets that bodies are piled up at every corner. Porters patrol the streets loading bodies onto carts or even tables and carry them to the burial site. You see, with there being so many dead, there’s not enough room to bury them in the cemeteries so mass graves have to be made by digging enormous trenches into which the dead are piled in their hundreds, layer upon layer until it’s full. The stench from these grave pits is overwhelming.