If you think living through the protracted political quagmire of the Brexit debate over recent years has driven us all to the brink of despair, consider yourself lucky you weren't living in Kent some 650 years ago.

Because a disaster would befall it which would see between a third to half of the population wiped out.

Families were decimated; agriculture - the main industry at the time - was left in disarray; and entire villages were laid waste.

The plague, or Black Death, was ruthless. And it ripped through Kent in the mid-14th century changing aspects of it forever.

And while lying dormant for months, sometimes years, it would return frequently over the next 300 years claiming even more victims.

Some three million people are thought to have died nationwide.

There has never been anything like it before or since.

"Kent in the early 14th century was a highly populated county," explains Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, an expert in medieval times who works at both the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University.

"It was a rich county in so much as it had good agricultural land, there are lots of small towns and lots of sea ports, as you would expect.”

The major towns we are so familiar with today would have already seen settlements, but much of Kent was defined by hamlets and some villages with farmsteads dotting the landscape.

What's more, the county had made considerable strides following the great famines of the early 13th century which killed many.

"So it was a prosperous county before it was hit by the Black Death which was around 1348-50," the academic explains.

The plague had originated in China and spread via trade routes across Europe – carried on the fleas of rats which stowed aboard merchant ships.

"This mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves" - William de la Dene

The first cases in the UK were spotted in June 1348 in the south and south west. It quickly spread and struck London just a few months later.

By the summer of 1349 it had gone nationwide.

With victims highly contagious, once you had contracted the bug it could kill within a week.

Adds Dr Sweetinburgh: "There's no way of saying how it came into Kent or where as there are not chronicle accounts.

"One assumes it was so quick and would spread from one place to the next. It's not going to arrive at one port, it's going to arrive at multiple places and spread.

"And you have to remember people were travelling across the Channel on a daily basis to trade with France."

William de la Dene, a chronicler who wrote in the Rochester Cathedral Priory, provides one of the few surviving snapshots of what life was like in the county during the period the plague first struck.

"A great mortality," he wrote, "destroyed more than a third of the men, women and children.

"As a result, there was such a shortage of servants, craftsmen, and workmen, and of agricultural workers and labourers, that a great many lords and people, although well-endowed with goods and possessions, were yet without service and attendance.

"Alas, this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves, from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard."

The impact on a God-fearing population was intense.

Dr Sweetinburgh suggests the number of people praying at the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral suggested many looked to the Heavens in a bid to protect them and end the 'great pestilence'.

She explains: "The first outbreak must have been doubly difficult.

"We have high mortality and not enough people to bring in the harvest.

"They would have been looking at a double catastrophe as aside from the deaths, there would be a dearth of food from that harvest."

The plague was relentless. Just as normality appeared to be returning it would strike again.

Adds the academic: "There was a patch in the latter part of the 14th century when things were better but in the 15th century there was one major outbreak each decade.

"In Kent there would have been confusion.

"Many of the major families before the Black Death arrived will have gone.

"There must have been a feeling of discontinuity. You're starting again."

The impacts would see some villages removed from the map.

"If you have a church standing on its own today," says Dr Sweetinburgh, "it doesn't mean there was a village around it and that village went during the Black Death - not in Kent.

"What you want to look for are churches that have become ruined as it points to the fact the congregation disappeared.

"So on the Romney Marsh, which was very populated, by the time we get to the later 15th century we're moving to a greater prominence of cattle by and large.

"If moving into more cattle, then you don't need the same number of people to look after the animals.

"So entrepreneurial butcher/graizers are getting tenants off the land and putting steers on there instead.

"So you get a decrease in population on the Marsh - partly due to the plague and partly because people are being moved off.

"The first outbreak must have been doubly difficult... they would have been looking at a double catastrophe as aside from the deaths, there would be a dearth of food from that harvest" - Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh

"Villages such as Midley disappears; Eastbridge goes."

It would also eventually lead to the introduction of sheep - starting a speciality of the region which continues to this day. It would also directly lead to a major social shift.

Wat Tyler was a peasant living, it is thought in Kent (he is linked to Dartford and Maidstone), who survived the plague and found himself one of the few remaining who could work the fields.

And in 1381, led other poor land workers to rebel against the government insisting on higher wages and more freedom from landowners.

While initially defeated - and Tyler killed - it would see changes ushered in and the opportunity for social mobility to emerge.

In the 17th century there were still major outbreaks - including the Great Plague of London between 1665-66 which killed 100,000 people - a quarter of the capital's then-population - in just 18 months. It also hit Kent.

It remains debatable if the popular theory of the Great Fire of London in September 1666 killed the rats - and the disease carrying fleas as a consequence – thus bringing the epidemic to an end.

In Kent, while the evidence suggests victims of the first outbreaks were buried in churchyards - there are records of St Clement's in Sandwich applying to the Archbishop of Canterbury to extend its graveyard to accommodate the bodies - the infamous 'plague pits' were more likely dug during the outbreaks of the 17th century.

They are rumoured to be sited around the county.

Yet, perhaps most remarkable, is that while we today assume the Black Death to be a thing of the past, the most recent cases were reported just two years ago in Madagascar which claimed 170 people and infected thousands of others.

Fortunately, medical advances prevented its spread and saved many lives.

There were also outbreaks in both Australia and the US during the first part of the 20th century.

Now, Brexit doesn’t seem quite so bad after all, does it?

• Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh is one of the organisers of the the Medieval Canterbury Weekend, taking place on April 3-5, 2020.