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The identification of some pestilences recorded in the Irish Annals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

William P. MacArthur
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Extract

In attempting to determine the medical nature of the various widespread diseases recorded by the Irish chroniclers, my procedure has been to collate the accounts given in the several annals, thus securing the maximum amount of information obtainable about each outbreak. In making these comparisons it was distressing to come across some isolated and incomprehensible statement, clearly a relic of what was once a fuller description but now curtailed through the arbitrary omission of details which the early transcribers did not understand. Where Ireland was involved in a more generalized epidemic, it was sometimes possible to supplement a meagre native account by drawing on subject matter recorded elsewhere. For example, little could be made of the Irish entries of the pestilence of 664, were it not for the story of its course in England which we owe to the Venerable Bede. These assembled data were studied in the light of present medical knowledge, aided materially in many instances by my own experience of the diseases concerned. In such ways it has proved possible to give a firm and I believe a correct opinion on the identity of some of the pestilences. In other instances, no more can be done than to suggest some probability; and if even this is impossible because of insufficient data, such evidence as there may be is presented for consideration, even though the problem is left unsolved.

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Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 21 , March 1948 , pp. 169 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1949

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References

1 Throughout this paper, ‘plague’ means bubonic plague. In old writings, ‘plague’, without further qualification, may stand for any severe epidemic disease ; but ‘the plague’ and ‘common plague’ (or ‘common sickness’) were used in a specific sense only. The special signification of the latter term was not in general appreciated by translators of the annals into English. Also in this paper, when the exact date does not help in the recognition of some disease, the year given in the text is retained even if known to be incorrect.

2 It has been argued that the rat was unknown in England before 1000 A.D., because the Anglo-Saxon word (raet) is not recorded until this date. It might be argued on the same evidence that the eagle (earn), the beaver (bifor), and the badger (broc)—although ‘broc’ is a Celtic word, presumably borrowed from the ancient Britons—also did not exist in England before 1000, nor the trout (truht) before 1050! As a matter of fact, English place-names show that the words for many common objects, trades, etc., were current centuries earlier than their first record in literature. In the Aryan languages, except for the Germanic group, the same word served for both ‘mouse’ and’rat’. As the latter word is found both in Old High, and Old Low, German, it seems reasonable to suppose that the Anglo-Saxon invaders brought it with them to Britain. A Low Latin hybrid raturus existed in Anglo-Saxon England, and appears in Ælfric’s Glossary, perhaps a relic of the Roman occupation. In spite of the confusing terminology in classical Latin and Greek occasionally the context shows clearly that mus was used for ‘rat’, as when Strabo, writing in the ist century B.C., points out that from great numbers of ‘mice’ pestilential diseases often ensue ; and that in spite of the efforts of ‘mouse-catchers’, who were given graded bounties proportionate to the numbers of ‘mice’ they killed, the Romans in Cantabria barely came through the pestilence with their lives (Geography, bk in, ch. 4, § 18). If Strabo’s word is taken as meaning mice in the modern sense, a piece of sound epidemiological knowledge becomes arrant nonsense. Moreover, some Roman carvings of rodents certainly represent rats and not mice.

The Irish of the 1100’s believed that rats were indigenous in their country for centuries past, and Geraldus Cambrensis records a story of the destruction of the library of a fifth-century Irish bishop by rats, ‘majores mures, qui vulgariter rati vocantur’. Whatever the basis of fact underlying this story may be, it is absurd to suppose that the Irish narrators, renowned for their tenacious memories, would not have known that rats were a new importation of the preceding century, had this been so.

3 Translations of the Old Testament, including the Septuagint and Vulgate, transfer the buboes of the Philistines from the groin to the anal region. Hence the A.V. reading : ‘And they had emerods (= haemorrhoids) in their secret parts’. The Rev- Dr H. Danby, Regius Professor of Hebrew, Oxford, tells me that the original Hebrew reading, ‘ofalim’ was an indecent word to the Hebrew mind, probably because of some sexual association. Consequently, for reading aloud, the marginal alternative ‘thorim’ meaning some kind of anal swelling, was used in its place. This marginal alternative became absorbed into the text, thus misleading the translators. The R.V. has ‘tumour’ instead of ‘emerod’ with ‘plague boil’ as a marginal reading. The A.V. mentions ‘mice’ (= rats) only with reference to the offerings imposed on the Philistines : ‘Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land’. The Septuagint has further readings which connect the plague with ‘mice’ including : ‘And in the midst of the land thereof mice were brought forth, and there was a great and deadly destruction in the city’.

4 Zinsser, H., Rats, lice, and history, p. 147,Google Scholar makes the startling statement : ‘There can be little doubt that the pestilence of Justinian was mainly one of bubonic plague, but the references to the general eruption of black blisters in many cases indicate that smallpox of a very severe type participated’ These ‘black blisters’ were, of course, plague blains.

5 Hist, wars, bk II, ch. 2–3.

6 Hist. Franks, bk IV, ch. 5. Gregory does not give any actual date, but his narrative shows that the groin-pestilence broke out eight years before St Gall’s death. The saint died in 551.

7 A.U- record this epidemic for the year 548, but the sentence naming it the Buidhe Chonaill has become detached and incongruously tacked on to the entry for 555 dealing with Pope Pelageus I—not the only error of the kind in these annals.

8 Vita St Cuthb., ch. 8.

9 The convenient label, ‘Black Death’, is a late importation into English, and, except in translations, is not recorded before 1823. ‘Black’ in this name has no reference to colour. It represents ater, which in mediaeval Latin meant black in the sense of ‘terrible’ only. So far as is known, ‘Black Death’ was not in contemporary use in any country In England the Black Death raged in two successive years, 1348 and 1349; and in Scotland similarly in 1349 and 1350. The epidemic is noted in the Irish annals for 1349, but the moving entries made by Hugh son of Conor Mac Eagan in the margin of his father’s copy of the Senchus Mór, show that the plague persisted during the following year. The translation here given is from R. I. Best’s Introduction to the photostat copy of that text :’One thousand three hundred and fifty years until to-night since Jesus Christ, Amen, was born, and in the second year after the coming of the plague into Ireland that was written. And I myself am full twenty-one years old, that is, Aedh son of Conchobhar Mac Aedhagáin, and let everyone who shall read this utter a prayer of mercy for my soul’ ; ‘Christmas Eve to-night, and under the safeguard of the King of Heaven and earth who is here to-night I place myself, and may Heaven be the end of my life, and may He put this great Plague past me and past my friends, and may we be once more in joy and happiness. Amen, Pater Noster. Aedh son of Conchobhar son of Gilla na Naemh, son of Donnshleibhe Mac Aedhagáin wrote that in the book of our own father in the year the great plague was in . . . .’

I am indebted to the Rev. Professor F. Shaw, s.j., for calling my attention to Mac Eagan’s further entry of 1351, previously unknown to me, recording that he had escaped the fate he dreaded : ‘A year ago this night (i.e. Christmas Eve) since I wrote those lines on the margin below, and may I by God’s will reach the anniversary of this night. Many changes ! Amen, Pater Noster.’

Hugh Mac Eagan lived for only eight years more. A.U- record his death in 1359, with the note that he had been chosen ‘to be the chief professor of jurisprudence’.

10 The puzzling name Cluiche an Righ, translated ‘The King’s Game’, is used for the Pestis Secunda (1361), the Pestis Tertia (1369–70), and for another outbreak of plague in 1504. Its origin is unknown. A note in A.F.M. quotes a gloss ‘.i. an plaigh’ (i.e. the plague), which is correct. It has been conjectured that there was some Irish belief in the healing power of a royal hand in plague. It is incredible, however, that there could have been any such physical approach to the plague-stricken at a time when ‘the father would not visit his son, nor the son his father’; and when ‘the sick died unattended, and were buried without priests’.

Cluiche also means ‘funeral rites’, and ‘The king’ is an everyday word in Irish for the deity. In England, the haemorrhagic spots of plague were called ‘God’s tokens’. Might some such association have suggested this Irish name? Ma Geoghagan did not understand it, as his entry for 1361 shows.

11 Hist. Franks, bk ix, ch. 22.

12 Ireland’s natural history, bk xxili, ch. 2.

13 Hist. Angl., i. 296.

14 Chir. Mag. (1585), tract, ii, doctr. ii, cap. V, p. 106.

15 Op. cit., ii. 197

16 Vita St Cuthb., ch. 33.

17 The book of children, ‘Small pockes and measeis’, appended to the Regiment of life (1545).