I'm watching an interesting doc about the plague on AHC. [View all]

[Brigid]

That's American Heroes Channel. One historian came up with an ingenious way to get a better estimate of the number of plague deaths in London in the 1349. He used enrollment of wills at the charter house. Enrollment is what happens when the person who made the will dies, and the his property is distributed according to his wishes. There was a huge spike in enrollment of wills in 1349, and this historian now believes that about 60% of Londoners died -- about 5 million people during a nine-month period. Why nobody thought of looking through those records before, I don't know.