A simple children’s ring game, a nursery rhyme, but born of a series of cataclysmic events in human history.  While there were many outbreaks of plague in antiquity, three major pandemics of Bubonic Plague visited Europe in the first two millennia of the Common Era.  The first recorded was the Justinian Plague in the 6th century, CE, and it was not until the 20th century that it was brought under control.  Our focus in this paper will be the second and greatest of these plagues, the Black Death of 1347 CE – 1351 CE and how it affected the development of Western Civilization.  A third plague, the Elizabethan Plague, struck in 1563 CE.