Although there are no direct records or proof that Carlingford suffered badly during the Black Death, we can be pretty sure the town was hit hard.
The plague ravaged through Europe in 1348 – 49. It was primarily bubonic, spread by bites from fleas living on rats, but there was also a second route of transmission of the disease, person to person. We are currently battling our own pandemic, but a key difference is the mortality rate. The Black Death killed at least half of Europe’s population and coastal towns, such as Carlingford, were the worst hit.
Much of what we know of the plague in Ireland comes from the writings of Franciscan friar John Glyn of Kilkenny, who himself became a victim. It first appeared in Howth and Dalkey in late July or early August 1348 and quickly spread to Dublin and Drogheda. It devastated the East Coast ports, so much that there was a shortage of sailors for many years afterwards. It was more severe in the Pale, killing a higher proportion of English settlers who had established themselves in walled towns and agricultural villages, probably with high rat populations; the Irish lived scattered in individual pastoral farming households. It was most severe of all in communities with monastic settlements, the Franciscan priory in Drogheda lost 25 of its members in a short time.
Carlingford, while not really in the Pale proper, was an English town in Ireland and it ticked all the plague boxes. A ’Murage Charter’ of 1326 was the signal to begin building its walls, it had a busy port and since 1305 a priory. The rental income for the town was worth more than £26 before the plague, but even when recovery was well under way, it was still worth only £20 in 1369, indicating that the town had suffered a major loss of population.
We know from the dendrochronological record – the historical science of tree rings – that oak forests, which had been in decline in Leinster, re-established themselves strongly in the second half of the fourteenth century as agricultural land was abandoned due to post-plague labour shortages. We should remember that major pandemics always have social, economic and political consequences. After 1350 the Pale, which had once coveredalmost the whole of Leinster, shrank to a 30-mile wide coastal strip from Dundalk to Dublin as the Irish strongly reasserted themselves and for some years threatened the very existence of the English colony.
