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Plague germs extracted from medieval corpses in a London cemetery have shed light on why the bacterium that unleashed the Black Death was so lethal and spawned later waves of epidemics.

The Black Death of the Middle Ages was a truly devastating pandemic - a pandemic being the Military-Industrial Full Blown Version of an epidemic. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed at least one third of the European population, so it was truly horrible. So most people think that the Black Death began in Europe - but it didn't.

Reading from his latest book, the second volume of Great Tales From English History, Robert Lacey paints a gruesome picture of the plague in Britain and tells the tale of the heroic village of Eyam.

The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer as previously believed. An analysis of 490 skeletons from a London cemetery for Black Death victims shows the infection did not affect everyone equally, researchers say.

A third of Europe's population died over four years due to the Black Death. But was it really spread by rats and fleas? Could it have been caused by a virus? And what has that got to do with the modern-day spread of HIV?