off by pestilence, with almost all who had gone with him[2]. Twelve years after, in 680, there was another severe pestilence in the months of July, August and September, causing a great mortality at Rome, and such panic at Pavia that the inhabitants fled to the mountains[3]. In 746 a pestilence is said to have advanced from Sicily and Calabria, and to have made such devastation in Rome that there were houses without a single inhabitant left[4]. The common name for all such epidemics is pestis or pestilentia or magna mortalitas, so that it is open to contend that some other type than bubo-plague, such as fever or flux, may have been at least a part of them; but no type of infection has ever been so mortal as the bubo-plague, and a mortality that is distinguished by a chronicler as causing panic and devastation was presumably of that type.

Pestilence in England and Ireland in the Seventh Century.

It is more than a century after the first great wave of pestilence had passed over Europe in the reign of Justinian, before we hear of a great plague in England and Ireland. Dr Willan, the one English writer on medicine who has turned his erudition to that period, conjectures that the infection must have come to this country from the continent at an earlier date. From the year 597, he says, the progress of conversion to the Christian religion “led to such frequent intercourse with Italy, France and Belgium, that the epidemical and contagious disease prevailing on the continent at the close of the sixth century must necessarily be communicated from time to time through the Heptarchy[5].” Until we come to the Ecclesiastical History of Beda, the only authorities are the Irish annals; and in them, the first undoubted entry of a great plague corresponds in date with that of Beda’s history, the year 664. It is true, indeed, that the Irish annals, or the later recensions of them, carry the name that was given to the plague of 664 (pestis ictericia or buide connaill) back to an alleged mortality in 543, or 548, and make the latter the “first buide connaill”; but the obituary of saints on that occasion is merely what might have occurred in the ordinary way, and it is probable, from the form of entry, that it was really the rumour of the great plague at Byzantium and elsewhere in 543 and subsequent years that had reached the Irish annalist[6].

The plague of 664 is the only epidemic in early British annals that can be regarded as a plague of the same nature, and on the same great scale, as the devastation of the continent of Europe more than a century earlier, whether it be taken to be a late offshoot of that or not. The English pestilence of 664 is the same that was fabled long after in prose and verse as the great plague “of Cadwallader’s time.” It left a mark on the traditions of England, which may be taken as an index of its reality and its severity; and with it the history of epidemics in Britain may be said to begin. It was still sufficiently recent to have been narrated by eyewitnesses to Beda, whose Ecclesiastical History is the one authentic source, besides the entry in the Irish annals, of our information concerning it.

The pestilence broke out suddenly in the year 664, and after “depopulating” the southern parts of England, seized upon the province of Northumbria, where it raged for a long time far and wide, destroying an immense multitude of people[7]. In another passage Beda says that the same mortality occurred also among the East Saxons, and he appears to connect therewith their lapse to paganism[8].

The epidemic is said to have entered Ireland at the beginning of August, but whether in 664 or 665 is not clear. According to one of those vague estimates which we shall find again in connexion with the Black Death, the mortality in Ireland was so vast that only a third part of the people were left alive. The Irish annals do, however, contain a long list of notables who died in the pestilence[9].

Beda follows his general reference to the plague by a story of the monastery of Rathmelsigi, identified with Melfont in Meath, which he heard many years after from the chief actor in it. Egbert, an English youth of noble birth, had gone to Ireland to lead the monastic life, like many more of his countrymen of the same rank or of the middle class. The plague in his monastery had been so severe that all the monks either were dead of it or had fled before it, save himself and another, who were both lying sick of the disease. Egbert’s companion died; and he himself, having vowed to lead a life of austerity if he were spared, survived to give effect to his vow and died in the year 729 with a great name for sanctity at the age of ninety.

The plague of 664 is said, perhaps on constructive evidence[10], to have continued in England and Ireland for twenty years; and there are several stories told by Beda of incidents in monasteries which show, at least, that outbreaks of a fatal infection occurred here or there as late as 685. Several of these relate to the new monastery of Barking in Essex, founded for monks and nuns by a bishop of London in 676. First we have a story relating to many deaths on the male side of the house[11], and then two stories in which a child of three and certain nuns figure as dying of the pestilence[12]. Another story appears to relate to the plague in a monastery on the Sussex coast, seemingly Selsea[13]. Still another, in which Beda himself is supposed to have played a part, is told of the monastery of Jarrow, the date of it being deducible from the context as the year 685.

Of the two Northumbrian monasteries founded by Benedict, that of Wearmouth lost several of its monks by the plague, as well as its abbot