2. People Were Buried Alive During the Black Plague
When the Black Plague tore through Europe in the Middle Ages, it killed off as much as 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population. Nobody was immune, and pretty much everyone on the whole continent lost somebody to the plague. This massive depopulation had pretty severe consequences for people’s social standing in Europe. With the epidemic killing off an entire population of serfs, the people who might ordinarily be expected to dig graves for all of the bodies were all gone. There wasn’t just not enough ground to bury all of the people or enough time to give them all a proper Christian funeral. There weren’t enough people to dig the graves.
Enter the mass grave, a crude form of burial in which a pit is dug and bodies thrown in together. Mass graves dug during the Black Plague were known as “plague pits,” and no one was allowed near them for fear that the disease would spread. Without a proper funeral to begin to mourn the loss of loved ones, people would often fling themselves into the pits; they often were not pulled out for fear that they now had the disease. Others who were near death threw themselves into the pit voluntarily and would be buried alive.
