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"Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London, said: "An emergency cemetery is a really uncommon find: they were open for a very short while in response to a disease that wiped out 60% of London in months. "They give us a snapshot of the health, lifestyle and demographic make up of London - and since the plague killed indiscriminately there should be a good cross-section.""

"Published on Jun 3, 2014 Jacqui Pearce, Senior Ceramic Specialist at MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), discusses the development of MOLA's medieval London pottery type series. The excavation of a number of waterfront sites in London led to the discovery of pottery-rich medieval dumps located behind wooden river revetments. The revetment timbers were accurately dated through dendrochronology which enabled MOLA to create an incredibly detailed typology of pottery through the medieval period. Pottery is the most common material found on archaeological sites and this precise dating information has been hugely important, enabling us to date the layers of archaeology found on our sites."

Medieval England experienced few revolts but the most serious was the Peasants' Revolt which took place in June 1381. A violent system of punishments for offenders was usually enough to put off peasants from causing trouble. Most areas in England also had castles in which soldiers were garrisoned, and these were usually enough to guarantee reasonable behaviour among medieval peasants. An army of peasants from Kent and Essex marched on London. They did something no-one had done before or since - they captured the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King's Treasurer were killed. The king, Richard II, was only 14 at the time but despite his youth, he agreed to meet the peasants at a place called Mile End. What were the peasants angry about and why had they come to London ?

In 1347 news reached England of a horrifying and incurable disease that was spreading from Asia through North Africa and Europe. The Black Death struck London in the autumn of 1348. No one knew how to stop the disease. During the next 18 months it killed half of all Londoners - perhaps 40,000 people.

" How well do you know your way around medieval London? Try this quiz of various sites around England's largest city. Some questions might be easy, but we threw in a few hard ones as well!"

"Evidence from skulls in east London shows plague had to have been airborne to spread so quickly"

"Medieval libraries in England were assembled in many places and for different purposes. Monastic libraries supported both theological education and the advancement of learning, and provided the seeds for later university libraries. Cathedrals and their schools likewise collected books and encouraged their reading. Royal libraries gathered both practical and artistic books, with illuminated manuscripts given and received as signs of wealth and power. However, our knowledge of these libraries can be described as limited at best. The majority of manuscripts have been lost over time, their greatest enemies being fire, war or insurrection, theft and neglect. So what can we know about the manuscripts contained in these medieval libraries? And how and where were these manuscripts produced?"

"Introduction: A visitor to the Empress Matilda's tomb at Rouen might be mistaken in believing that its occupant had never sought the English throne in her own right. Yet in the long struggle which engulfed the kingdom after her father's death in 1135 this is exactly what she did. Matilda may indeed have been the greatest English heiress of the twelfth century to fail to secure her inheritance. Charles Beem remarks that Matilda's epitaph 'described the summit of earthly achievement to which a twelfth-century aristocratic woman could aspire, according to the dictate of a male-dominated feudal society'. Matilda's rule lasted less than seven months before she was unceremoniously driven out of London in the spring of 1141. Even so, her lordship bore many of the typical characteristics of royal administration, and with King Stephen imprisoned by her supporters Matilda for a time was recognised as the sole source of royal authority in the kingdom."

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 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.

"One of the questions we're most frequently asked at the British Library is: why is there more than one manuscript of Magna Carta? The simple answer is that, when the Great Charter was first granted by King John in 1215, numerous copies were made so that its terms could be distributed more easily throughout the kingdom of England. Four of those 1215 manuscripts survive to the present day, one of which is owned by Lincoln Cathedral, another by Salisbury Cathedral and the other two being held at the British Library in London."

" What did medieval cities look like? Or more precisely, how did medieval people depict cities? Here are 15 images from the Middle Ages that show how the urban world looked like."

The international effects of Black Death Death and disease were familiar features of life in the Middle Ages, but previous epidemics were dwarfed by the arrival of the Black Death. It erupted out of central Asia to create a pandemic greater even than the Plague of Justinian 800 years earlier. Present in bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic forms, the Black Death had killed millions by the time it finally declined. Europe may have lost a third of its people, China perhaps half. Besides death, the disease brought fear, panic and very often a complete breakdown of society.