The most difficult times to survive in Britain

People who live in Britain today may not feel like it’s a safe country to live in, but it’s certainly far from the worst. If a disaster happened today, there would be a national or possibly even global response to try and fix it. New medicines would be made to fight diseases and crop failures could be fixed by importing food, but before this level of technology and infrastructure, the people of Britain simply had to make do with whatever their situation was, and some of those situations were bad enough to rival the worst times of any country.

The Glacier fluctuations of the first humans in Britain

(Scenes like this would have been common around the elevated areas of the country, and came with miles of surrounding blizzards and freezing temperatures)

The first ancestors of mankind arrived in Britain from a land bridge that connected it to France and arrived 600,000 years ago. After this, Neanderthals arrived around 300,000 years ago and died out when modern-day humans showed up about 40,0000 years ago. At this time the northern half of the British Isles was covered in huge glaciers that reached as far south as the lake district and completely covered all of northern Wales.

The glaciers didn’t stay in place and would swell and retract a few dozen miles over the thousands of years people lived alongside them. The livable south of the country would have been similar in climate to modern-day Iceland, but during a swell it would turn everything in front of it for miles into a frozen wasteland and push the extreme cold further south, forcing people to abandon their homes and migrate to the south coast or out of the British isles all together.

Archeological digs around the country that have uncovered Neanderthal bones show they occupied the British Isles on four separate occasions. They would live here after walking over the land bridge from mainland Europe, which sank around 6,000 BCE when the sea levels began to rise and stayed in the country for years before having to abandon it due to a glacial swell. After the swell retracted, people would follow the cold north and re-occupy the country again.

The Bubonic Plague

(A plague doctor, the era’s attempt at a protective suit against the plague. Because infected fleas found it difficult to get through, it worked to an extent, but the people wearing them still didn’t have any medicine to give people)

It would be dangerous to be anywhere in Europe when this plague hit, and Britain was one of the many places that suffered greatly from this disease. Also known as the Black Death, this fast-acting disease was carried by fleas and caused the deaths of millions, mostly due to a complete lack of anything that could be used as medicine. It reached London in 1348 after having been spread across southeastern Europe, presumably from as far as India, but the origin of the disease is unknown.

It killed between 50 and 200 million people around the world, but keeping records on the general population wasn’t really a thing at the time, and when people died they were simply just buried without any records of it happening. The exact number of people who died can never be found out, but almost half of the population of Europe died from this disease and the scariest thing about it was there was nowhere to run.

Irelands potato famine

(An illustration of life onboard a famine ship, also known as coffin ships due to the high mortality rate of their passengers)

During the mid-1800s, Ireland was under the control of the British government and the native people would all live on land owned by someone in England. Instead of paying rent, the locals would have to work on the lands of the estate owner to produce grain which was sent abroad to be sold. The natives would grow their own crops and depended heavily on the potato to meet their needs, but in 1845 a disease called potato blight hit the country and quickly spread throughout Ireland.

This disease caused all the potato crops in the country to fail and led to mass starvation throughout the population. This could have been solved by the British estate owners but instead, they focused on their own profits and even threw many native Irish off their lands when they couldn’t work and pay rent. The population of Ireland was around 8.5 million people before the blight hit, and just over 6 million by the time it had finished in 1851. Around 1 million people died from starvation, and at least 1 million more took the famous famine ships to find a new life in North America.

The Roman Conquest of Britain

(If you were alive during the first 40 years of the Roman invasion, you had a 1 in 8 chance being murdered by them)

It took just over 40 years for the Romans to invade Britain after their first landing, but eventually did so and managed to leave a trail of dead in the process. The population of the British Isles was estimated to be close to 2 million people before the Romans arrived, but they killed about 250,000 people during their conquest, which was 1 out of every 8 people.

After the initial conquest, they stayed for just over 300 years before the order to leave was given in the year 388 AD, but wasn’t completed until the year 400 AD. It’s estimated that at least another 100,000 natives were killed by the Romans during this time, but records weren’t kept on slaughtering natives so a real and accurate number will never be known.