6th-10th century AD

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

The plague first arrived in the British Isles in 544 or 545, when it reached Ireland. `The great mortality called "blefed"', according to the Annals of Tigernach, it later became known as `the first great plague' to distinguish it from the later and equally devastating plague of 664.(12) Although we lack the description of symptoms which would enable us to identify the disease as plague, there can be virtually no doubt as to its being that. In the geographical advance of what was certainly bubonic plague, northward transmission rather than the coincidental visitation of some other disease is likely to explain the Irish outbreak. The conclusions to be drawn from what is a chronological sequence -- Constantinople, 541/2, western Mediterranean, 542/3, Ireland, 544/5 -- gain added weight from our knowledge of Ireland's maritime connections with Gaul and the Mediterranean world. In the mid-sixth century those connections were numerous and extensive. Pottery came in on a large scale, more especially from Atlantic Gaul but also from the eastern Mediterranean; and there is more tentative evidence for the import of corn and cloth, traded commodities notorious for the mobility which they offered to the rats and fleas which were the source of bubonic plague infection.(13) Here, almost for certain, was the main route for the spread of plague, and one probably to be followed when plague moved into seventh-century England.

For some thirty years after the plague of the 540s a variety of epidemic diseases affected Ireland, none of them clearly identifiable as bubonic plague and none recorded after the mid-570s. They almost certainly included smallpox, the `yellow plague' (buidhe chonaill) recorded by the Ulster annals as bringing a `great mortality' in 549, and a disease notorious for its virulence in societies previously unvisited.(14) Either this disease or, less probably, the earlier bubonic plague may well have spread to Britain, for the Annales Cambriae note the death of the Welsh ruler King Maelgwn of Gwynedd in the `great mortality' of 547.(15) The reliability of this annal has been questioned. Yet the close maritime contacts between western Britain and both Ireland and the Continent make the transmission of one or other disease seem entirely plausible. Whether it spread beyond Wales to lowland Britain we cannot know. Neither the silence of the exiguous sources nor the apparent (and perhaps illusory) separation of western Britons from midland and eastern English necessarily imply immunity;(17) and the seeming origins of many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the years after c.550 -- Bernicia, Deira, Essex and Kent, for instance -- could indicate a new start after a demographic and political hiatus.(18) But not much can be built on half a dozen words in a doubtful text.

As far as we can see, therefore, the plague was still sporadically active in continental Europe, extinct in Ireland, and either as yet unknown or at least long past, at the time of its simultaneous descent on both England and Ireland in the 660s. Before assessing its nature and effects in England our first task must be to trace its course: an elementary prelude to any discussion, but one hitherto, and surprisingly, neglected.(19)