Plague Pits at Finsbury

A plague pit is the informal term used to refer to mass graves in which victims of the Black Death were buried. The plague which swept across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are estimated to have killed between one-third and two-thirds of Europe’s population. Disposal of the bodies of those who died presented huge problems for the authorities, and eventually the normal patterns of burial and funerary observance broke down, usually during the most severe epidemics.

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