Exploring Eastern Dartmoor in the Age of the Black Death - Dr David Stone

Name: Exploring Eastern Dartmoor in the Age of the Black Death - Dr David Stone
Start: 2025-04-08T19:15:00+01:00
End: 2025-04-08T21:00:00+01:00
Location: Tavistock Parish Centre, Plymouth Road, Tavistock, PL19 8AU United Kingdom

Schedule

Tue Apr 08 2025 at 07:15 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Tavistock Parish Centre, Plymouth Road, Tavistock, PL19 8AU United Kingdom | Plymouth, EN

The Black Death refers to the outbreak of disease in England in 1348-9. What is perhaps most extraordinary about this era is that we can recover so much information about it: despite the elapse of over six and a half centuries, we can trace its passage through local communities and reconstruct the impact it had on ‘ordinary’ people and the economy and society of which they were a part. This talk looks in particular at the arrival of the Black Death, the nature of the disease, and the scale of the mortality it caused will also provide a sense of what life was like on Dartmoor and its surrounding areas both on the eve of the Black Death and in its wake.
Dr David Stone is a medieval economic and social historian. He was the first joint Oxbridge Research Fellow and has taught medieval and early modern history at the universities of Cambridge and Exeter. He is the author of Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Cambridge, 2005) and he edited the accounts for the manor of Esher in the Winchester Pipe Rolls (2017), along with articles on topics such as diet, drought, sheep farming, labour productivity, the Black Death, Chaucer’s reeve, and monastic mortality.
He has always sought to encourage and assist local communities to explore their past, not just using documents but through archaeology and the landscape, too. Most recently, he was involved in a Heritage Lottery-funded community project about medieval Dartmoor, co-writing Moor Medieval: Exploring Dartmoor in the Middle Ages (2019) and presenting two short films about medieval settlement on Dartmoor. He recently also trained to teach secondary Mathematics and has recently been appointed as Head of Department at a school in Torbay.
TLHS Members - Free. Guests £3 per person.