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Encyclopedia entry: Black death
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to Irish History
Copyright© The Oxford Companion to Irish History 2007, originally published by Oxford University Press 2007. (Hide copyright information)
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Black death,
the name given to an epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague that spread rapidly from Asia to Europe in the 1340s, arriving in the British Isles in the summer of 1348 and causing huge loss of life and massive social disorder. Our main source for its arrival in Ireland is the chronicle of the Kilkenny‐based Franciscan friar John
Clyn
. He claims that the plague first hit the ports of Drogheda and Howth (or Dalkey). Dublin and Drogheda are said to have been almost wasted of inhabitants, so that in Dublin alone, by Christmas 1348, 14,000 had died (a figure that is no doubt exaggerated), along with many of the Franciscans in the friaries of dublin and Drogheda. ...