6th-10th century AD

Past & Present, August, 1997 by J. R. Maddicott

During the second half of the seventh century the English kingdoms, along with much of the rest of the British Isles, were affected by severe outbreaks of epidemic disease. They were described by contemporary writers in terms which varied from the briefly factual to the near apocalyptic. The most famous of those writers, Bede, recapitulating the events of his Ecclesiastical History, noted their onset in 664 with stark concision: `And the pestilence came' (et pestilentia venit). In the body of his text, completed about 731, he had already provided a more elaborate and emotive record, speaking of `a sudden pestilence raging far and wide with fierce destruction', which `laid low a great multitude of men'. It was `the mortality which ravaged Britain and Ireland with cruel devastation', `the pestilence which carried off many throughout the length and breadth of Britain'.(1) Nor was Bede the earliest witness to its terrors. Adomnan, abbot of Iona and biographer of Columba, writing c.697, close to the events which he recounts, alluded to `the great mortality which twice in our time has ravaged a large part of the world'.(2) The anonymous Life of Cuthbert, composed between 698 and 705, drew upon the memories of a priest, Tydi, who recalled `the mortality which depopulated many places';(3) while the biographer of Wilfrid, writing c.715, spoke simply of `the great mortality'.(4) All these authors had lived through the afflictions which they describe, and, as we shall see, they provide enough detail to substantiate their general recollections of what had clearly been, if they can be believed, a catastrophe. Without prejudging its nature, we shall henceforth call the agent of that catastrophe `plague'.

Consideration of these plagues bears on some central topics in early Anglo-Saxon history: monasticism, rural settlement, and demography, for example. Yet their almost complete neglect by modern historians is perhaps less surprising than it may at first seem.(5) For our knowledge of the plague's effects we are almost entirely dependent on literary sources of a special sort: ecclesiastical writers with a hagiographical bent, for whom plague was a helpful but incidental part of their story, used to illustrate the virtues of a king or the prophetic words of a saint or the miraculous powers of a vision.(6) The Anglo-Saxonist can only envy the Byzantine historian of plague, who can draw on epigraphy, numismatics and administrative texts to control his comparable writers.(7) It goes without saying that we lack entirely both the manorial and church records which provide guidance on mortality during the plagues of the fourteenth century, and the statistics of prices and wages which allow us to chart the long-term effects of those plagues. Archaeology, more valuable for the seventh century than for the fourteenth, we do have; but archaeology offers no precise dates and therefore little sustainable correlation with historical events. Faced with all these difficulties in the assessment of plague, Anglo-Saxon historians have generally, and understandably, passed by on the other side.

Despite the inadequacies of our sources, it may nevertheless be worthwhile to set out what is known and what may be deduced about a series of disasters which were certainly fatal to many and probably traumatic for those who survived.

I

The plague which first struck England in 664 fell within the cycle of plagues which affected western Europe and the Mediterranean lands from the mid-sixth to the mid-eighth centuries. Originating in Egypt, the plague spread to Constantinople in 541 or 542, where it is said to have caused many thousands of deaths.(8) Thence it quickly moved westwards, presumably via seaborne commerce, reaching Italy, Gaul, Carthage and Spain within a year and later extending far into the interior of Gaul, along the great river systems which were the arteries of inland trade. Through this whole region sporadic attacks continued until the 760s.(9) They appear to have been most frequent and destructive in the sixth century, but appearances may be deceptive here, for when Gregory of Tours ceased to write in 591 we lose our best informed source for the history of plague in Gaul. In the notoriously unchronicled seventh century, outbreaks almost certainly went unrecorded. Fredegar, Gregory's feeble successor, mentions only one, though we know that there were others. It seems to be Bede alone, for example, who records the pestilentia in Rome which carried off Wighard, the English candidate for the see of Canterbury in 667 or 668.(10) That it was indeed bubonic plague whose course we can thus trace, rather than one of the other epidemic diseases current in this period, is proved by the three writers, Procopius, Gregory of Tours and Paul the Deacon, who describe the characteristic plague buboes, the large hard swellings of the groin and other lymphatic glands, which marked out its victims. To Gregory the symptoms gave the plague its name: it was lues inguinaria, `the groin plague'.(11)