Brief introduction

Above, the Black Death’s route of travel to Ireland and arrival at important seaports of the Pale on the eastern coast was briefly linked with the original introduction of the Black Death in Melcombe/Weymouth in south-western England. A thorough presentation and discussion of this important event in the history of the Black Death and Ireland are given in this chapter. The medieval sources for the history of the Black Death consist mainly of annals. Below they will be presented and analyzed again according to the craft of the medievalist historian.

The island of Ireland is 486 kilometres long and 288 kilometres wide, and covers a territory of 84,431 km2, with a generally mild and oceanic climate.

The Pale was a swathe of land centred on Dublin that stretched from Bray in the north-eastern corner of Wicklow, 20 km south of the centre of Dublin, to north of Dundalk in Louth, and inland included the ‘counties’ of Kildare and Meath, which in the latter case also included a stretch of the coastline. The Pale was the base of English rule in Ireland with many English settlers and much the same economic and social structures and culture as in English counties. Outside the Pale, the Irish-Gaelic clans still dominated and related to the English with hostility. There was a clear economic and social difference between this English type of settlement and culture and the more pastoral form of Gaelic-Irish clan-structured society. The size of Ireland’s population at the time is not known, except that is must have been much smaller than England’s, for reasons of the much smaller size of the territory and the much stronger emphasis on arable husbandry in English agriculture. The more pastoral economy of Irish-Gaelic society was a more extensive type of husbandry that, as a general rule, requires a larger area per unit of calorific production than arable husbandry, which limited the number of people that could live off the land. This balance would be affected by sale or barter of animal products for corn or farina.

Apparently, there are no sources of data suitable for estimating of mortality rates.