“The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw ‘death coming into our midst like black smoke. . . . Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit!’ It is seething, terrible . . . a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry . . . a painful angry knob. . . . Great is its seething like a burning cinder . . . a grievous thing of ashy color. Its eruption is ugly like the ‘seeds of black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal . . . the early ornaments of black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries. . . .’”

—Barbara W. Tuchman, from A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, 1978.