IN 1349, Nottingham had a population of around 3,000 – not much more than present-day Trowell. Within a year, half of them had died, killed by the worst epidemic Europe has ever seen. Those who survived were terrified, unable to come to terms with the unimaginable loss around them and in dread that this had been some sort of divine justice.

The symptoms of the illness, which was spread by fleas on rats, were ghastly in the extreme, as Benedict Gummer writes in his absorbing new study: The Scourging Angel*.

History blames the Mongol army for infecting Europe. Their leader Jani Beg had laid siege to the city of Caffa in the Crimea and when his soldiers began dying in hundreds, their bodies were catapulted into the besieged city. As the inhabitants began dropping like flies, Genoese traders fled to their ships, unwittingly transporting the pestilence with them.

"Some victims suffered a terrible fever which rendered them senseless and speechless until death," writes Gummer. "In others the lungs were affected."

Quoting a contemporary account, the author says: "The throat and tongue, parched from the heat, were black and congested with blood."

On other victims "great abscesses were formed on the legs and the arms, from which, when cut, a large quantity of foul-smelling pus flowed."

Other victims were covered with black spots.

Whatever the symptoms, the outcome was inevitable, they died. It was beyond any rational explanation of the time.

The plague arrived in Notts in Newark, at the busy trade junction of what is now the A1 and the River Trent – then one of Britain's most-used waterways.

Within weeks, Newark's cemetery was full and further land had to be acquired and consecrated – burial on unconsecrated ground carried immortal peril to the departed's soul.

By May 1349, the great pestilence had spread, engulfing Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

The Wakebridge family, Derbyshire knights and landowners, were based in a manor on top of a hill near Crich.

That year, six of the family died.

By then, 65 of the 126 incumbent church ministers in Notts had died of the plague. One account says: "The land was uncultivated, crops unreaped, cattle unfed, ownerships of land confused, monies uncollected, justice unadministered, everything upset, and there was a great outburst of vice, while men cursed God because of the plague which had been brought about by the neglect of sanitary precautions."

Amazingly, some good came of it all. As Gummer points out, England's governmental processes proved to be resilient and the nation rallied.

In Nottingham, a school of alabaster carvers emerged, making visually enchanting objects of piety for altars and churches.

Under such as Peter Mason, who had his workshop in St Mary's Gate in 1399, their work became so beautiful that it was exported far and wide – examples are to be seen not only in England but throughout Europe.

The Scourging Angel: Black Death in the British Isles by Benedict Gummer is published by the Bodley Head at £25.