Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (20 page)

The second half of the sixth century saw the conception, if not the birth, of protomodern Ireland in other ways, too—especially in terms of religion and language. And, as in England, it was almost certainly the natural catastrophes of the mid–sixth century that destabilized the geopolitical and cultural status quo, opening up the way for massive and rapid change.

The period 538 to 553 was one of almost total disaster in Ireland. The worldwide climatic chaos of the mid-530s led, in Ireland, to crop failure and famine. As noted in Chapters 13 and 14, the
Annals of Ulster
say that there was a “failure of bread” in 538. This crop failure was part of a particularly severe overall disruption of plant growth in Ireland that is testified to in the tree-ring record for 536 to 540—a record that has been compiled by cross-sectioning and analyzing the trunks of waterlogged ancient oaks discovered in Irish peat bogs.²

Then in the early or mid-540s a terrible epidemic broke out. Irish sources provide two conflicting dates for this disaster. One of them, the medieval
Cronicum Scotorum,
gives 541, a date suggesting that the epidemic (perhaps smallpox or a similar disease) was triggered by the 538 famine.³ More likely is the date provided by the
Annals of Ulster,
545. In that year both France and Spain were already infected with plague, and it is probable that it spread to Ireland from either of these areas or directly from the Mediterranean. As mentioned in Chapter 13, some Irish population centers (Lough Shinney, near Dublin, and the royal fortress of Garranes, near Cork) are known, from archaeology, to have ceased to function in or immediately after the mid–sixth century. Even the greatest in the land were taken by the epidemic; the annals record that one of the country’s leading churchmen, Mo Bí Clárainech, died of it.

But worse was to come, for in 550 Ireland was engulfed by a second epidemic—this time almost certainly plague. Referred to in the annals as the
Mortalitas Magna
(Great Death), the disease must have wiped out a substantial proportion of the population, including a large element of the relatively small literate and governing elite.

The
Annals of Ulster
actually record the deaths of five prominent victims—senior churchmen from Bangor in the northeast, Tipperary in the south, the Dublin area in the east, and Leinster and Lough Derg in the center and west of Ireland. The dead clerics probably represented the loss of 20 to 30 percent of the top tier of churchmen in this one outbreak alone.

Then in 553, practically before the survivors had recovered from the horrors of the 550 outbreak, a third epidemic, again without doubt plague, broke out.

From a geopolitical standpoint, the plague and even the pre-plague period had been relatively peaceful. In the forty-five years prior to 555 there were only eleven battles recorded in the Irish annals.
⁴
But immediately after the depopulating experience of the famine and plague years, all hell seems to have broken loose. In the forty-five years after 555, twenty-seven battles are recorded—almost two and a half times more than in the equivalent preceding period. Indeed, in the ten years from 556 to 565 there were no fewer than eight recorded battles—more than three times the average known warfare rate for the previous four and a half decades.

As in other parts of Europe, the plague affected certain parts of Ireland more than others. If normal plague patterns pertained, areas that were more densely populated and often richer were devastated to a relatively greater extent than sparsely populated ones. The pandemic therefore had the effect of reducing population-level differences between fertile and less fertile areas. This afforded a rare opportunity for post-plague expansion to less prosperous warlords in less fertile and therefore less densely populated districts—especially those farthest from contact with the Continent.

That is precisely what seems to have occurred. The warfare that engulfed Ireland after the pandemic was characterized by the rise to power and prominence of a hitherto little-known family from the relatively infertile northwest of Ireland—the Uí Néill. Prior to the arrival of the plague, the Uí Néills had been local warlords, little known outside the Sligo Bay area on the Ulster-Connacht border. Yet within a decade of the end of the pandemic, they had seized much of west and central Ulster and large tracts of Meath. The poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter records their victories in Ulster and central Ireland in the 550s. “Well satisfied” was “Baetán of the yellow hair,” say the
Annals of Ulster,
referring to the delights of conquest enjoyed by the king of the Uí Néills.

The wars of the second half of the sixth century were very much Uí Néill conflicts or the results of them—often battles in which Leinstermen or Meathmen or Ulstermen tried to repel or throw off the ever-expanding Uí Néill yoke. The period from the seventh century to the ninth was an era in which the Uí Néill family, originally from the remote northwest, increasingly brought most of Ireland under their direct or indirect control.

It was this loose hegemonic unification that paved the way for the gradual emergence in the ninth to eleventh centuries of a single united Irish kingdom. Uí Néill Ireland was thus the ultimate political ancestor of the modern Irish nation-state. As in England, the plague had been midwife to a nation.

But it was not simply in political terms that famine and plague forged the character and nature of Ireland. In religious terms the experience of the famine and the plague appear also to have had an effect, as the plague years and immediate post-plague period saw the founding of the first really important churches and monasteries in Ireland. Four are specifically mentioned in the various Irish annals: the monasteries of Derry (in 546), Clonmacnoise (sometime in the period 543–548), Bangor (in 557), and Clonfert (in 562). Although Ireland’s aristocracy had been officially Christian for two or three generations and there must have been many small churches already in existence, the churches founded in this era were the first to be recorded in the annals.

It is likely that the experience of the great famine and the three epidemics had created a strengthened demand for divine intervention. The traditional quasi-druidic gods and spirits of popular paganism had not produced a shield against starvation, disease, and death, and there must have been a sincere longing for more effective access to divine protection and an increased chance of life in the hereafter.

Major new churches and monasteries, run as they were by members of the ruling elite, were also important in political terms. If, through the Church, rulers—often Uí Néills—could have both God and people on their side, then vital political as well as religious objectives could be realized. Increasingly, the ecclesiastical expansion ran parallel to the political one. Uí Néill churchmen staged takeovers (probably of doubtful legality) of rival churches and monasteries, just as Uí Néill warriors took over rival territories and kingdoms. But the net long-term religious effect of the plague itself, and the related church-founding phenomenon, was to Christianize the mass of the population to a degree that had not been achieved before. Residual druidic influence must have withered on the vine as Christianity offered salvation to the afflicted and a helping hand to the emerging Uí Néill ruling elite.

The mid-sixth-century catastrophe also forced changes in lifestyle generally. As warfare became endemic (following the geopolitical destabilization), the general level of security seems to have dropped. From the mid–sixth century onward, even the lowest of farmers began to construct defenses around their relatively humble homesteads. Typically they would build small stone ramparts or earthwork enclosures around their farms, mainly in order to protect themselves and their livestock in troubled times. As warfare increased so, no doubt, did banditry and cattle rustling conducted by robber gangs and small armies living off the land. Between the mid–sixth and ninth centuries an estimated seventy thousand of these defensive farm enclosures (now known to archaeologists as ring forts) were built, and forty-five thousand still survive as deserted ruins.
⁵

T
he chaos and disorder that followed the plague-induced geopolitical destabilization did more than create a security-conscious mentality. It also helped shape the nature of Irish linguistic and literary culture.

Modern Irish is essentially an evolved version of a form of Celtic that came into existence in the late sixth century. Prior to the great famine and the plague epidemics of the middle of that century, the Irish spoke a form of Common Celtic (the ancestor of all the surviving Celtic languages in the British Isles). Then, in the mid– to late sixth century, there was a very rapid linguistic landslide: Many word endings were dropped in a process known to linguists as apocope, and middle syllables were lost in many words in a parallel process known as syncope. What is more, the way words were pronounced changed. A new accent evolved (or an existing one spread more widely) in which very powerful stress was put on the beginnings of words while noninitial long vowels were shortened. Linguists have deduced this by studying the changes in surviving inscriptions and texts from the fourth to the seventh centuries and by applying an understanding of known mechanisms of linguistic change to those texts.

This virtual linguistic revolution took place because of alterations to the demographic balance caused by the mid-sixth-century plague disaster. The old establishment, based as it was in the more densely populated areas of southern and eastern Ireland, was decimated, and new accents from the periphery flowed into the linguistic vacuum as peripheral warlords took advantage of this demographic equalization. Furthermore, as the small traditional literate class was most likely severely reduced in size, there may have been a partial scribal discontinuity, after which new scribes would have been more open to nontraditional linguistic influences. Even the nature of Irish poetry changed, with the traditional long-line meters of ancient Ireland replaced by meters based on Latin Christian hymns.

A
mid disaster and untold suffering, protomodern Ireland had been conceived, along with its language, popular religion, and even aspects of its literature. But the climatic events of the mid–sixth century and their epidemiological consequences were also forcing change on the mainland of western Europe.

F R E N C H  G E N E S I S

“W
hen the Plague finally began to rage, so many people were killed off throughout the whole region and the dead bodies were so numerous that it was not even possible to count them. There was such a shortage of coffins and tombstones that ten or more bodies were buried in the same grave. In [one] church alone on a single Sunday, 300 dead bodies were counted. Death came very quickly. An open sore like a snake’s bite appeared in the groin or the armpit, and the man who had it soon died of its poison, breathing his last on the second or third day.”¹

Thus wrote the great sixth-century Gallo-Roman bishop and historian Gregory of Tours in
The History of the Franks,
describing the depredations of the bubonic plague in the city of Clermont in central France. In Gregory’s century, the disease devastated parts of what is now France on at least four occasions: 543–544, 571–572, 581–584, and 588–590. And just as it helped shape Britain’s future, the pandemic appears to have had a substantial effect on the nature of subsequent French history.

During the first and second centuries
B.C.,
Gaul (the old name for what is now France) was conquered by the Romans. As the centuries wore on, Roman culture and language became firmly established, but in the mid–third century
A
.
D
. Germanic peoples—including a group called the Franks—raided deep into Gaul. After several decades they were repulsed, but a century later further incursions took place, and this time the Frankish invaders could not be dislodged. They were allowed to remain as Roman allies on Gallo-Roman territory in what is now Belgium. Then in the fifth century, as the western Roman Empire began to disintegrate under pressure from a plethora of Germanic invaders, the Franks seized parts of northern Gaul and by 507 controlled all of what is now France, except Brittany, Burgundy, and the far south (including Provence). By 537 Burgundy and Provence had also fallen, and the Franks were beginning not only to build an empire but also to see themselves as the heirs of Rome in the west.

They adopted Roman law and language, Roman-style governmental practice and court protocol, the Roman Catholic religion, and even Roman titles. But in one vital and surprising respect, they did not follow Roman precedent: They did not base themselves in the traditional high-status seats of former Roman political power in the southern half of France. The great Roman palaces of Arles and Lyons remained unused—at least by Frankish monarchs.

The reason for this is that by the time the Franks had the opportunity to adopt a southern power base, in the mid–sixth century, the key southern cities were experiencing a particularly savage decline at the hands of the plague. The pandemic did not affect all of Gaul equally; the more urban south appears to have been hit far worse than the less urban north. As a result (and as in Britain), there was a political and economic realignment, with the once gloriously imperial, once wealthy south losing its appeal from every conceivable point of view.