Plague of 1348

This year a great pestilence raged through the greatest part of the world, and among other places destroyed vast numbers in the city of Dublin. It was called from the greatness of it the first peftilence, as having spread more mortally than any other that had before happened, and in respect of others that happened a few years after.

John Clyn, a franciscan of Kilkenny, who lived at that time, gives a particular account of it in his annals, which therefore I choose to translate. "This year, and chiefly in the months of September and October, great numbers of bishops and prelates, ecclesiastical and religious, peers and others, and in general people of both sexes flocked together by troops, in pilgrimage to the water of Tachmoling, insomuch that many thousands of souls might be seen there together for many days.

Some came on the score of devotion, but the greatest part for fear of the pestilence which raged at that time with great violence. It first broke out near Dublin, at Hoath and Dalky; it almost destroyed and laid waste the cities of Dublin and Drogheda insomuch, that in Dublin alone from the beginning of August to Christmas, 14.000 souls perished.

This pestilence had its first beginning (as it is said) in the east, and pasting through the Saracens and Infidels, flew 8,000 legions of them it: seized the city of Avignon, where the Roman court then was: the January before it came among us, where the churches and cemeteries were not sufficient to receive the dead and the pope ordered a new cemetery to be consecrated for depositing the bodies of those who died of the pestilence; insomuch, that from the month of May to the translation of St. Thomas, 50,000 bodies and upwards were buried in the same cemetery.

This distemper prevailed in full force in lent; for on the 6th day of March, eight Dominican friers died. Scarce a single person died in one house; but it commonly swept away husband, wife, children and servants all together."

The author seems to have died of this plague, and to have had a foresight of his approaching fate. For he closes his annals in 1348: "But I (says he) frier John Clyn, of the franciscan order of the convent of Kilkenny, have in this book written the memorable things happening in my time, of which I was either an eye-witness, or learned them from the relation of such as were worthy of credit, and that these notable actions might not perish by time, and vanish out of the memory of our successors, fleeing the many evils that encompass us, and every sympton placed as it were under a malevolent influence. expecting death among the dead untill it comes, such things as I have heard delivered with veracity, and have strictly examined, I have reduced into writing.

And lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail with the workman, I leave behind me parchment for continuing it, if any man should have the good fortune to survive this calamity, or any one of the race of Adam should escape this pestilence, to continue what I have begun."