“Draconian means were adopted by the despot of Milan, Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, head of the most uninhibited ruling family of the 14th century. He ordered that the first three houses in which the plague was discovered were to be walled up with their occupants inside, enclosing the well, the sick, and the dead in a common tomb. Whether or not owing to his promptitude, Milan escaped lightly in the roll of the dead. With something of the Visconti temperament, a manorial autocrat of Leicestershire burned and razed the village of Nosely when the plague appeared there, to prevent its spread to the manor house. He evidently succeeded, for his direct descendants still inhabit Nosely Hall.”
—Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamatous 14th Century.
Updates. You’re probably wondering whether the Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, who started out a neorealist but in later years shifted into more stylized depictions of aristocratic cruelty and decadence, was descended from these pathological nobles. He was.
The razing of Nosely village was related to Tuchman in a 1974 letter from Lord Arthur Hazelrigg (1910-2002) a British baron whom Tuchman described as “direct descendant of the autocrat, and present proprietor of Nosely Hall.” But in 2012 losses from the Great Recession compelled the family to sell.