Facing Infectious Disease in Early Medieval Ireland
Rachel Singer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History. She received her MPhil in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic from the University of Cambridge in 2022.
Source: Bodleian Library
If you’re like me and care a bit too much about long-past pandemics, there’s no better place to study them than Ireland. Ireland arguably has the best textual records for outbreaks of infectious disease outbreaks in the early Middle Ages (ca. 500–1000 CE) of anywhere in Europe, and its records even rival those from better-documented regions like East Asia.
The European early Middle Ages are sometimes called the ‘Dark Ages’ not because of the post-Roman ‘decline’ or ‘barbarization,’ but because there are so few textual records surviving from the period that historians often cannot ‘see’ what was happening. Historians hoping to write about Britain in the sixth century or continental Europe in the seventh have virtually no texts to work with. Therefore, much of what they know about what happened comes from documents written centuries later or from the archaeological record. Scholars thus speak of the lights being ‘on’ or ‘off’ in certain regions and periods based on how much information survives from them.
The lights are definitely on in medieval Ireland, and they turned on quite early. Beginning around the year 563, Irish monks living at the abbey of Iona in modern-day western Scotland began chronicling the most important things that happened each year. They recorded only one or two events per year, providing only the most basic details. The annal for 545 exemplifies this sparse and mysterious style, recording only that there was “a great mortality which is called blefed” (a particularly frustrating record since nobody knows what blefed means!). This chronicle continued for centuries, moving to the western Irish province of Brega by the eighth century, and splitting up into two different branches in the tenth, but continuously, contemporaneously recording important events. This chronicle survives today only in much later manuscripts, in later continuations, and sometimes only in later translations, the collection of which is known as the Irish Annals. And the monks who collected the Irish Annals for over a millennium really cared about infectious diseases.
The Irish Annals are therefore full of accounts of epidemics and epizootics (animal epidemics). They occasionally record a vivid, vernacular name for the disease which can help scholars to diagnose it. The bolgach – blistery disease – which struck Ireland in 680, for instance, has usually been diagnosed as something smallpox-like, while the outbreaks of scamach (literally ‘lungy’) in 783 and 786 must have had pulmonary symptoms, perhaps coughing or wheezing. The same is true for animal outbreaks, like the máelgarb (‘bald-rough’) epizootic among cattle in 985, which seems to have affected the cows’ skin. The annals also sometimes provide records of particularly notable people who died in these outbreaks, which tells us where in Ireland they struck. For instance, a 549 outbreak of buide chonnaill – meaning something like ‘straw yellow’ – reportedly killed numerous monastic founders in Leinster and therefore seems to have been a nuisance in the west of Ireland. So, despite the Annals’ sparse style, they provide an exceptional amount of information, giving scholars a decent idea of what kinds of diseases were at play, when they struck, and where.
They also give us an idea of the social conditions that affected an outbreak, indicating that the early Irish were aware of the complex interplays between society and disease which the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into such sharp relief. The annalists, for instance, were cognizant of the fact that the very old, the very young, and people with preexisting health conditions are most likely to suffer in epidemics, for the Annals record “a great pestilence affecting the old and children and the sick on the island of Ireland” in 825.
They also recorded an example of what scholars would today call a ‘syndemic’ or ‘synergistic epidemic’ – a term recently coined by medical anthropologists to describe the complex interactions between multiple concurrent diseases and underlying social and ecological factors. A simplified modern example of a syndemic would be the interaction between the social condition of poverty and the diseases asthma and COVID-19; people with asthma are more likely to suffer health complications from a COVID infection and people living in poverty are less likely to receive adequate treatment for either asthma or COVID. The experiences of people suffering all three conditions are therefore shaped by the complex ways in which the conditions interact to increase their chances of poor outcomes.
The Irish Annals seem to evidence an early medieval syndemic situation in 925, recording that the Hiberno-Norse (‘Viking’) population living in Dublin experienced concurrent outbreaks of a skin disease called clamtrusca and a dysenteric ‘bloody flux.’ The Annals thus reveal that the annalists believed that only this social group (and not the Gaelic Irish group to which the annalists belonged) in only this one, urban location experienced two concurrent epidemics, revealing their attention to social and geographic/demographic factors underlying peoples’ experience of epidemics. Their evidence suggests that the concept of a syndemic may not have been entirely foreign to the early Irish, though they would, of course, not have recognized the word.
The Irish Annals are far from Ireland’s only evidence for infectious disease. The vernacular Irish legal corpus, compiled in the seventh to eighth centuries, discusses which diseases could invalidate the recent purchase of an animal or enslaved human, while Irish saints’ lives record both epidemics and the healing of day-to-day ‘endemic’ diseases by holy men and women. But tragically, most scholars studying early medieval disease neglect Ireland and its wealth of relevant evidence. My research going forward will seek to better bridge the gap between scholars of Ireland and scholars of medieval disease in the hope that Irish evidence can better shine a light upon ‘Dark Age’ disease in Europe and beyond.