Black death

Black death, the name given to an epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague that spread rapidly from Asia to Europe in the 1340s, arriving in the British Isles in the summer of 1348 and causing huge loss of life and massive social disorder. Our main source for its arrival in Ireland is the chronicle of the Kilkenny‐based Franciscan friar John Clyn. He claims that the plague first hit the ports of Drogheda and Howth (or Dalkey). Dublin and Drogheda are said to have been almost wasted of inhabitants, so that in Dublin alone, by Christmas 1348, 14,000 had died (a figure that is no doubt exaggerated), along with many of the Franciscans in the friaries of dublin and Drogheda. Clyn's account, noting that there was hardly a house in which only one had died, with whole families being carried off, and describing how bishops, prelates, nobles, and others came in their thousands on pilgrimage to St Mullins, Co. Carlow, captures something of the prevailing sense of horror and crisis.

As the risk of infection was increased by social contact, townspeople suffered more severely than rural communities. It was reported, for instance, in 1351 that the greater part of the citizens of Cork had died. For this reason it is usual to suppose that the native Irish were less severely affected, as was bluntly stated in a petition sent by the Anglo‐Irish to the king in 1360, though the Irish annals do report its devastating effect on Moylurg, Co. Roscommon, in 1349. We have no accurate way of estimating the mortality figures. The archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitzralph, preaching before the pope in August 1349, claimed that the plague had killed two‐thirds of the English population but had not affected the Irish and Scots to the same extent. Modern estimates range between a third and a half of the population. The Black Death hastened an economic decline which had been under way already for several decades, producing a prolonged agricultural depression. As a result, lands formerly held by the Anglo‐Irish colonists were abandoned, and manors, villages, and some of the smaller rural boroughs were deserted. There was also, as in England, a movement away from demesne farming, whereby lords ceased direct management of outlying estates and instead leased them out to others. The plague periodically recurred after the initial out‐break in 1348–9.

Bibliography

Butler, Richard (ed.), The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn and Thady Dowling (1849)
Gwynn, Aubrey , ‘The Black death in Ireland’, Studies, 24 (1935)

Seán Duffy