...with going to your local grocery store pharmacy and getting a vaccination for the plague. How times have changed.

social mobility and paving the way for the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. WW1 finished the job of the French Revolution in destroying the old order in Europe yet again. Every cloud has a silver lining.

on England and Europe, I recommend Barbara Tuchmann's book on the 14th century, A Distant Mirror.

It covers the whole century, but there is a chapter on the Plague of 1348-50 that quotes contemporaries on what it's like as they experience it. Makes you feel like you are there. One quote, left unfinished as the writer succumbed to the disease, is from a sole survivg monk in his order, who says he is writing about it in case "any of the race of man' would live to tell of it in the future.

She names some famous people of the times who were victims and describes the effects on society - numerous vacancies in the churches and universities filled by incompetent, untrained replacements; the flagellants spreading rebellion in the church and simultaneously spreading the disease as they went from town to town.

Also describes the slaughter of Jews in several towns across Europe as they were accused of causing the Plague.

Worth reading to get a sense of the times and of human nature when mass fear overtakes people and society breaks down into lawlessness.