Plague without rats: The case of fifteenth-century Iceland

Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 22, No, 3, pp, 263-284, 1996

S0304-4181(96)00017-6

Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in The Netherlands. All rights reserved 0304-4181/96 $15.00 + 0.00

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Plague without rats: the case of fifteenth-century Iceland Gunnar Karlsson University of Iceland, Faculty of Arts, Sudurgata, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland

Abstract In the fifteenth century Iceland was ravaged by two epidemics which usually have been identified as plague. It is shown here that these epidemics were no less lethal than the Black Death in Europe. The first one probably killed half the population or more and persisted in the country for at least a year and a half. Since, for several reasons, it can safely be assumed that Iceland was not populated by rats at this time, this may offer the strongest available proof that an epidemic like the Black Death was not dependent on rats for its dissemination. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.

Since the great epidemics of plague in China and India around the end of the nineteenth century, it has been common knowledge that this was the same disease that had ravaged Europe in the mid-fourteenth century and later received the impressive name o f the Black Death. Further, it has usually been taken for granted that the disease normally raged in the from of bubonic plague, which infected people through the agency of the black rat and its parasitic flea, Xenopsylla cheopis. However, many schblars have noticed that this description does not agree well with known facts about the Black Death in Europe. There is little mention o f dead rats in the records, and the plague raged, even throughout winter, in climates where the black rat and its flea could hardly have been roaming about. Indeed, it has been known for most of the twentieth century that plague can spread with vectors other than the rat flea. Other parasites have been mentioned as possible vectors, especially the human flea, Pulex irritans, but it has hardly been proved that it can carry an epidemic. It seems more important that plague can spread directly from person to person in a primary pneumonic form, and considerable epidemics of that kind are known in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, most s c h o l a r s have been reluctant to suppose that pneumonic plague by itself could cause a major epidemic. In his study of plague in the British Isles, J.F.D. Shrewsbury denied explicitly, and repeatedly, that pneumonic plague could persist as an independent disease. As he was convinced that most of England was too sparsely populated to sustain a sufficient number of rats for an GUNNAR KARLSSON is professor of history at the University of Iceland at Reykjavik. He has published on aspects of the history of Iceland in both the medieval and the modem periods.

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epizootic of plague, he preferred to challenge the dominant opinion and concluded that the Great Pestilence had probably not killed more than 5% of the English population. ~ At the same time, though, he had recourse to other diseases, mainly typhus fever, to explain evidence of mortalities that by no means could be discarded. 2 Christopher Morris criticised Shrewsbury for disregarding the possibility of primary pneumonic plague.3 Nevertheless, Graham Twigg followed Shrewsbury's lead when he argued that the Black Death was not plague, but most probably anthrax 4 Finally, a Norwegian historian, Ole JCrgen Benedictow, has recently published a major study of the plague in Northern Europe, mainly in Norway and Iceland, where he argues vigorously that the disease must have been spread by rat fleas. Other diseases are hardly considered by him, and all other forms of contagion are excluded, mainly because they are said to be insufficient to explain epidemics of the dimension under discussion here.5 Benedictow's thesis has already begun to influence the international literature of plague studies. In a survey of the Black Death by Rosemary Horrox, which is likely to have wide effect because of its outstanding clarity, she assumes that pneumonic plague may have been the prevalent form in the medieval epidemics, 'at least in southern and western Europe', referring in a footnote to Benedictow about a possibly different situation in northern Europe 6 So, the present status of the research can be said to be the paradoxical one that the mode of infection that has been considered to be most likely in cool temperatures,7 was active in the warmer parts of Europe, while the heat-loving black rat and its even more heat-dependent flea spread it in the coolest regions. If Benedictow were right, the plague would be the one and only piece of evidence to show that rats existed in medieval Iceland, which seems unlikely in a country with arich literary tradition from the Middle Ages. It will be propounded here, not only that Benedictow is wrong, but also that Iceland offers a strong proof for the occurrence of a serious medieval pestilence without rats. The case of Iceland seems to prove that in the Middle Ages an epidemic could rage through a large and sparsely populated country, persist for about nineteen months, and be extremely lethal, without the help of rats or any kind of rodent fleas. Contrary to the contention of some authors 8 the pandemic did not reach Iceland around the mid-fourteenth century. On that occasion the island enjoyed its advantage of lying hundreds of miles across the North Atlantic from its nearest neighbours to the east and south-east: Faroe, Norway and the British Isles. This splendid isolation, however, seems to have helped only for half a ,Century. In the course of the fifteenth century tj. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1971), 2, 6, 23-36, 122-3. 2Shrewsbury, Bubonic Plague, 104, 107, 110, 114, 124-5. 3C. Morris, 'The Plague in Britain', The Historical Journal, 14 (1971), 207-9. 4G. Twigg, The Black Death: a Biological Reappraisal (London, 1984), 161-70, 208-22. SO. J. Benedictow, Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries. Epidemological Studies (Oslo, 1992), 25-32, 71-3, 123-5, 156-92, 214-64, 267-74. 6The Black Death, ed. R. Horrox (Manchester, 1994), 6. 7Morris, 'Plague in Britain', 207. Twigg, Black Death, 163. SE.g. Shrewsbury, Bubonic Plague, 37. R. S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York, 1983), 58.--J. Steffensen, 'Plague in Iceland', Nordisk medicinhistorisk drsbok (1974), 42 and J. Steffensen, Menning og meinsemdir. RitgerOasafn um mrtunarsrgu [slenzkrar 19jdc3ar og bardttu hennar viO hungur og srttir (Reykjavfk, 1975), 325, traces the most likely origin of this misconception.

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Iceland was visited by two severe epidemics, in 1402-04 and in 1494-95. Both in popular tradition and by most scholars, these have been identified as being the same disease as caused the Black Death in Europe. In Icelandic they are usually called pl6gur (sing. pldga), the first and the second, when we need to distinguish between them. As it has been generally agreed that Iceland was not colonized by rats until centuries later, alternative solutions have been sought for the plague epidemics. In 1965, an Icelandic biologist, Om61fur Thorlacius, proposed in a radio lecture the theory of a different disease. About a decade later the physician and medical historian J6n Steffensen argued for a primary pneumonic plague.9 A Norwegian physician, Per Oeding, has suggested that the plague in Iceland resulted from infection through the human flea, Pulex wrttans. Finally the present author and his fellow historian, Helgi Sk61i Kjartansson, have recently made the fifteenth-century epidemics in Iceland the object of a thorough study and argued for a higher mortality rate than most previous authors, estimating the death of some 50-60% of the population in the first epidemic and 30-50% in the second. On the nature and form of the disease we did not pretend to be qualified to pass a definite judgement. Nevertheless, judging by the pieces of evidence that historians can evaluate, nothing seemed more likely than J6n Steffensen's theory of primary pneumonic plague. ~J The present article can be seen as a defence of the late J6n Steffensen against Benedictow's critique of his conclusions. At the same time it is a presentation of those conclusions of Kjartansson and myself which seem relevant to the general history of the plague, although with some additional material which has a bearing upon the argument. It would be tedious here to repeat all the arguments and reservations concerning our use of Icelandic sources, let alone all the references to sources and literature that only people who read Icelandic could use. On a number of points of that kind a sceptical reader must be referred to our original text. In order to substantiate my thesis of a severe epidemic without the presence of rats, I must prove two things that led up to it, firstly that the epidemics in Iceland really were something like the Black Death in Europe in their mortality rates, and secondly that there were no rats in Iceland at the time of the epidemics. I shall attempt to do so, when I have established the course taken by the two epidemics. Finally, I shall add a few words in support of the theory of primary pneumonic plague. •

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I0

The course of the epidemics

Unfortunately, the fifteenth century is the only century in the history of Iceland about which we have no extensive written narratives. The course of the first epidemic is mainly known from the so-called New Annal (N~ji ann6ll). ~2 It was probably written in 9Steffensen, 'Plague in Iceland', 40-1, 44-5, 53-4. Steffensen, Menning og meinsemdir, 321,323-30, 337-8. O. Thorlacius, 'Hvac~a dreps6tt barst hingac3 ~iri0 1402?' Lesb6k MorgunblaOsins, 65:23 (16 June, 1990), 4-7. "~P. Oeding, 'Pest p~ Island i det 15. hrhundre', Tidsskriftfor den Norske l-zegeforening, 108 (1988), 196-201. ~G. Karlsson and H. S. Kjartansson, 'Plfigurnar miklu fi [slandi', Saga, 32 (1994), 11-74. t2Ann6lar 1400-1800, I (Reykjavl'k, 1922-27), 9-11.

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the 1430s, in the vernacular like most Icelandic annals, but preserved only in a rather imperfect sixteenth-century manuscript. A few important pieces of evidence about the epidemic are to be found in a small fragment of an annal covering about thirteen years around 1400. The fragment is preserved in a seventeenth-century manuscript, but it 13 contains details which must have been written down in the fifteenth century.

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According to New Annal the plague arrived in a ship in 1402. It does not say where the ship landed, but the fragment adds the point, which fits well with our knowledge of the spread of the epidemic, that it came to the harbour of Hvalfj6r6ur in the southwestern part of the country. 14 By Christmas the plague reached the Bishop's See at Skfilholt, in the central South. Two documents containing vows of atonement in the hope of protection from approaching plague are preserved from the North, one written on Christmas Day 1402 in GrenjaOarstaOur in 19ingeyjars22sla, the other on 16 January 1403 in Munk@ver~i in Eyjafj6rOur. These documents record that the epidemic had reached Skagafj6r0ur in the central North before Christmas. 15 The following year, 1403, New Annal calls the year of great mortality and mentions by name some people who died, presumably from the plague, both in the far West (Ntipur in D~rafj6r6ur) and in the far East (EiOar in Flj6tsdalsh6ra6). The year 1404 the Annal characterises as the second

13j. Helgason, 'T61f annfilagreinar frfi myrkum firum', in: Sj6tfu ritgerOir helgaOar Jakobi Benediktssyni (1977), 399-418. 14According to New Annal the shipowner's name was Hval-Einar, which is generally considered to be a misreading of the original, which would have said that to Hvalfj6rOur Einar came. ~SDiplomatarium Islandicum. [slenzktfornbr(fasafn, vol. 3 (Kaupmannah6fn, 1896), 680 (no. 569), 682 (no. 571).

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winter of mortality and relates that the plague returned to Sk~ilholt. The annal fragment adds that the plague receded after Easter. 16 A few more documents are preserved from the first half of the fifteenth century, where the 'plague winter', 'plague year' and 'posterior plague autumn' are mentioned. ~7 The last mentioned confirms the evidence of the annals that the plague raged in the country for more than a year. The annals indicate that the ship arrived late in the summer of 1402. New Annal relates that Pastor ,~li Svarth6fc3ason was the first clergyman who died from the plague, 'in the autumn', and the fragment says that he died in Botnsdalur, near the harbour in Hvalfj6r0ur, on his way from the ship. It is most likely therefore that the ship did not arrive until September. If the epidemic receded shortly after Easter 1404 it persisted in the country for about nineteen months. At the time of the second epidemic, 1494-95, no annalist was active in the country, as far as we know now. The earliest annal after the end of New Annal in 1430 is Gottskdlk's Annal. It is not anonymous as Benedictow maintains, j8 but written by a well-known clergyman, Gottskfilk J6nsson, who was not born until thirty years after the second plague. All he has to say about it is this, under the year 1495:~9 'Great disease and plague all over the country, except in Vestfir0ir, so that for the most part communes were devastated and districts. Abbot/tsgrlmur of 19ingeyrar died.' The important point here is that the large peninsula, the Vestfir0ir, escaped. It can be estimated that this saved some 12% of the population from the peril of the plague. The testimony of Gottskfilk's Annal is confirmed and augmented by a few seventeenth century annals, three of which provide some independent and possibly relevant information. Bishops' Annals by J6n Egilsson are more of a chronicle than an annal. It was written in 1605 and partly based on first-hand knowledge of the plague. One of J6n's informants was fourteen years old at the time of the plague. SkarOs6rann611 by Bj6rn J6nsson is even later since the relevant part was written in 1639, but where the author's narrative can be checked, his information is found to be relatively reliable. Finally, Annalium in Islandia farrago was written in Latin by Bishop Gfsli Oddsson, also in the 1630s. This seems a far less reliable work than the other two, although of course it cannot be discarded altogether,z° The annalists disagree on where the disease came to the country, but all of them name places somewhere in the southern or south-western part: Vestmannaeyjar, Hafnarfj6r0ur, Seltjarnarnes and Hvalfj6r0ur. They also disagree about the date, ranging from 1492 to 1495, but contemporary and near-contemporary documents prove that the epidemic was active in the western and north-western part of the country during the winter 1494-95. 2~ ~6Helgason, 'T61f annfilagreinar', 407. According to the fragment this was in 1405, but it dates the whole course of the epidemic a year later than New Annal. ~TDiplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 3, 739 (no. 615), cf. vol. 3, 683 (no. 572), 715 (no. 591); vol. 4 (Kaupmannahikfn, 1897), 498 (no. 539), 533 (no. 567). ~SBenedictow, Plague, 46. tglslandske Annaler indtil 1578. Udgivne ved G. Storm (Christiania, 1888), 372. The terms denoting localities in the original are the roughly synonymous hreppr and sveit, which both refer to the smallest administrative units in the country. 2°Safn til siigu islands, vol. 1 (Kaupmannah6fn, 1856), 43-4. Anndlar 1400-1800, vol. 1, 74-5; vol. 5 (Reykjavlk, 1955-88), 484. 2~Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 7 (Reykjavfk, 1903-07), 242-7 (no. 297), 256 (no. 307); vol. 14 (Reykjavlk, 1944-49), 582-4 (no. 413), 609 (no. 430). Cf. Steffensen, 'Plague in Iceland', 51-2. Steffensen, Menning og meinsemdir, 335-6.

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This seems to make it undisputable that the plague reached the country in 1494, and we have no records of it there after 1495. According to J6n Egilsson and Gfsli Oddsson it receded in the autumn, near Holy Cross Day (14 September) or St Martin's Day (11 November).

Mortality The sources which can be used to determine mortality rates in the epidemics are mainly of two kinds. On the one hand we have the annals, on the other documents which provide information about the rate at which farms were abandoned in the first decades after the epidemics. None of these sources offers accurate information about mortality, nor are they easy to interpret. However, the two kinds of sources are apparently independent of each other. The author of New Annal w a s apparently interested in mortality rates and stated a number of instances which, at first sight at least, seem to allow a statistical calculation. Other annals also provide bits of knowledge which can possibly be used in the same way. Let us first look at the evidence as it stands and set aside our general reservations about truthfulness for a while, as far as that is possible. The first five examples are from New Annal: (1) The Bishop's See of Skfilholt in 1402. The See was completely devastated, only the bishop and two laymen survived.--It is thought likely that Skfilholt housed at least 100 persons. If only three survived, the mortality rate is 97%. (2) The monastery of bykkvib~er in 1403. For some unknown reason, the annai tells two stories about the mortality in the monastery. According to the first, the abbot and six brethren died, but six brethren survived. According to the second story, a few lines later in the text, only two brethren and one man servant survived.--However we interpret the stories, 22 they point to a mortality rate of more than 50%. (3) The convent of Kirkjub~er in 1403. The abbess and seven sisters died, six sisters survived. The convent lost all its servants three times, so in the end the sisters had to milk the cows themselves.--It is easy to calculate that the death rate among the nuns, including the abbess, would be 57%. The clause about the servants is probably to be taken to mean that they all either died or fled. Then they were replaced by new servants (although not necessarily the full number). This group disappeared and was replaced by the third group, which also disappeared. At any rate this is a description of far more than a 50% mortality rate. (4) Burials at Kirkjub~er in 1403. To the church there came 795 dead bodies, which were counted. After that so many came that they could not be counted.--The parish of Kirkjub~er had only about 30 farms 23 with hardly more than some 250 inhabitants. Even though some corpses were brought there from other parishes, where the priests were dead, it is not possible to get up to 795 dead, let alone the uncounted number said to have arrived after them. Some people must have been alive to bring the corpses to 22One of the stories may refer to another monastery, in which case l°ykkviba~rwould be a scribal error. 23Diplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 8 (Reykjav~, 1906-13), 6 (no. 5).

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Kirkjub~er. Either the number is wrong--mistakes in writing Roman numerals are common in medieval manuscripts--or it is just a storyteller's indication of the shocking mortality. Such indications are well known in medieval sources about the Black Death in Europe if4 (5) The Bishop's See of Skfilholt in 1404. The See was deprived of servants three times. Three priests and most of the other clergymen died; two priests survived.--We meet here a similar problem of interpretation as in Kirkjub~er (3 above). But, even if we take only the priests, their mortality rate is 60%. Among those of lower orders and laymen the annal certainly does not allow a lower estimate. (6) One important piece of evidence can be found in the above-mentioned fragment of a medieval annal. It states that by the end of the epidemic only six or seven priests were alive in the diocese of H61ar and less than 50 in the diocese of Skfilholt.--The full number of parish priests in the H61ar diocese was probably around 140 at this time. If only six or seven of them survived, that is a death rate of some 95%. In the Skfilholt diocese it is said that 290 priests were needed 25 which gives a death rate of 83%. Admittedly, these numbers seem to be too high to be credible. In England there is strong evidence of a mortality rate of about 4 0 - 4 5 % among beneficed clergy in the Black Death, 26 a number which some scholars have found difficult enough to accept. But, even if we allow for considerable exaggeration, and assume that priests were in greater danger because of their duties towards dying people, the annal seems to indicate that not many parishes escaped the first plague altogether. It supports the evidence of New Annal that the plague reached practically the whole population. (7) Bj6rn J6nsson starts his entry for 1496 in Skar0s~irannfill by writing that all clergymen in the diocese of H61ar died except twenty, and that each surviving clergyman had to serve seven churches, which corresponds pretty well with the known number of churches. With the same normal number of priests as in (6) above, this gives a mortality rate of 86%. (8) J6n Egilsson, the author of Bishops' Annals, gives a moving picture of the mortality in the second plague in the central South, where he was brought up and later served as a priest: In this plague the mortality was so great, that no-one remembered or had heard of anything like it, because many farms were devastated, and on most farms only three or two survived, sometimes children, usually two or mostly three, and some of them yearlings, and some sucking their dead mothers. Of these I saw one, who was called Tungufell's-Manga... Where there had been nine children, two or three were left alive. An average of eight individuals on a farm, including crofters on some holdings and compound households on others, is not far from the number at the time of the first general census in Iceland in 1703. According to J6n, none or two or three survived on 24Cf. E Ziegler, The Black Death [London, 1982 (lst ed. 1969)], 52. :SThe number is highly problematic and refers to a somewhat earlier time, around 1200. At any rate, though, the Sk~ilholt diocese was much larger and more populous than that of H61ar, and 200-300 parishes would not be an unlikely number. 26Shrewsbury, Bubonic Plague, 77. Ziegler, Black Death, 236.

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each farm conclusion (9) J6n proportion

Gunnar Karlsson

hit by the plague, and of nine children two or three survived. A straight from J6n's evidence would be a mortality rate of 70-80%. Egilsson proceeds with a description which may indicate how large a of farms was visited by the epidemic:

One man I saw who was fourteen years old in that plague, and I spoke with him; his name was J6n and he was laorbjarnarson, the father of b6rd/s in Oddi and grandfather of pastor Oddur in Hraunger~Ji and his brothers and sisters. J6n told me that he had lived at ,~s, close to Hruni, and no plague came there and no-one died, nor in Hamarsholt, nor in Efri-b6rissta0ir in Grimsnes, nor in Kaldfirh6fSi. These four farms he named, where no plague had arrived. These four farms which, according to J6n borbjarnarson, were spared by the plague are all known now. They lie in two communes, in the district of ,~rness~sla, where J6n Egilsson must have heard many stories about the plague, as he was brought up in one of the communes (Grimsnes) and served as a pastor in the other (Hrunamannahreppur). Between these two communes lies a third (Biskupstungur). It includes Skfilholt where J6n Egilsson got his education, but there he does not seem to have heard of a single farm which was not visited by the plague. These three communes probably contained some 120 farms altogether 27 Thus, if J6n's information is taken literally, the rate of farms visited would amount to 97%. However, it would be too much to expect him to know every single farm that had escaped. It nevertheless does seem safe to conclude that in the days of J6n Egilsson it was spoken about as exceptional if a farm had been spared. A fair estimate might be that not more than 10% of all farms in localities where the plague raged could have escaped the epidemic. This estimate applies to the whole of Iceland' s population in the sense that practically everyone lived on individual farms; there were hardly any villages and certainly no towns. It would also be relatively safe to argue that the two epidemics behaved in a similar way: Icelandic authors soon identified these two epidemics and no others as pldgur. 28 We do not know of any cultural or social differences between the times of the two occurrences. The distance in time between them excludes the possibility that people survived the second plague because they were immune after the first one. As will be explained below, it is perfectly possible, and not at all unlikely, that the population figure had reached the same level as before the first epidemic when the second one arrived. What, then, can we conclude from the evidence of the annals? A mortality rate of 70% on farms where the epidemics came might seem reasonable. If 10% of the farms escaped in localities which were visited, that would mean a 63% mortality rate in those localities. Finally, it can be expected that some remote localities were spared altogether, although the mortality rate among priests makes it unlikely that this commonly happened. If we guess that 5% of the inhabitants escaped the first epidemic in this way 27B. Lhrusson, The Old Icelandic Land Registers (Lund, 1967), 105-9. 28Steffensen, 'Ptague in Iceland', 41-2, 44-5, 49-50, 54. Steffensen, Menning og meinsemdir, 324-5, 328, 333-4, 338-9.

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(remote localities are rarely populous), we get the mortality rate down to 60%. In the second plague the whole of the Vestfirc3ir escaped, which would bring the number down to approximately 53%. Of course annals can be deceptive. When used as material for statistical calculations, they are likely to cause two kinds of error. On the one hand, there is the well-known propensity of annalists to exaggerate, and Icelandic annalists could exaggerate grossly about mortality in remote places, either in time or space. Thus, contemporary Icelandic annals claim to know that only fourteen persons survived in London in the Great Pestilence of 134929 and an eighteenth-century annal from eastern Iceland tells a story which maintains that only two persons were found living in the huge district of Mfilas3)sla after the plague there. 3° On the other hand, there seems little reason to write off the testimonies of annalists who were close to the events, both in time and space, not least because from our modern point of view they sound extremely realistic in tone. They hardly even mention the wrath of God in connection with the plague. In the estimate above the danger of exaggeration has already been met to a certain extent: For instance, no attempt has been made to use statistically reports that the See in Skfilholt and the convent at Kirkjub~er repeatedly lost all their servants. The estimate--70% on farms which were visited--is in fact exclusively based on the sources which seem most trustworthy, partly on the small numbers of monks, nuns and priests (nos 2, 3 and 5), partly on the narrative of J6n Egilsson (no. 8), which seems to be based on a careful study of oral sources. There remains a more covert danger that these examples are unrepresentative. Even the most truthful annalist would hardly choose an average case for his narrative, but prefer the most impressive one. Thus it is possible that the author of New Annal mentions the mortality rates at laykkvib~er and Kirkjub~er, but not those in the monasteries at Helgafell or Vic~ey, because the plague hit the latter houses less severely. The remedy for this source of error would be comparison with conclusions from sources which could hardly have been created to give their readers a drastic impression of the plague. In Iceland such sources are mainly documents which inform us of deserted farms in the first decades after the epidemics. From the years 1431-49, twenty-seven to forty-five years after the first epidemic, we have documents from which it appears to be possible to calculate the abandonment rate for six groups of farms. The result is summarised in Table 1. No. 1 is based on visitations of the bishop of H61ar to 17 local churches in his diocese in Northern Iceland in 1431-32:~ In all cases the report says how many farms belong to a parish, but in nine cases only it mentions how many of them are deserted. This can be interpreted in two ways, either that all farms were inhabited in parishes where no abandonment is mentioned, or that the number of deserted farms was simply not written down in some parishes. (From a modern point of view, documents of this kind appear remarkably inconsistent in the kind of information they include.) Since it is primarily the aim of this study to find the minimal scale of desertion, it seems better to keep on the 2'~lslandske Annaler, 223, 275, 404. ~Anndlar 1400-1800, 5, 276. ~Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 4, 464-8 (no. 509), 51 I - 4 (no. 550).

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Table 1 Deserted farms in Iceland 1431-1449 No. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Year

Category

Total

Inhabited

1431-32 1446 1446 1446 1447 1449

Bishop's visitations G uOmundur Arason's farms Farms of Munkalaver~i Farms of Reynista6ur Farms of M6Omvellir Farms of H61ar

179 180 44 52 74 187

145 175 31 38 35 164

Deserted 34 5 13 14 39 23

19% 3% 30% 27% 53% 12%

safe side and choose the first alternative, which gives a desertion rate of 19%. The second alternative would give 35%. No. 2: In 1446 a large landowner in Vestfirc~ir, Gu6mundur Arason, was sentenced to outlawry and all his property confiscated by the crown. A list of this property includes 180 farms, of which only five seem to be deserted. 32 No. 3 shows farms owned by the monastery in Munkalgver~i in Evjafj6r6ur, northern Iceland, in 1446.33 The monastery is said to own 4 3 n a m e d farms, which must have been intended for tenant occupation, according to Icelandic practice. 34 (The home farm of Munkalgver~i is the 44th one in Table 1.) The document does not say explicitly which of the farms were devastated, but some of them obviously were. For six farms no rent was paid, and for at least seven the rent was abnormally low (less than 90 ells per year). I assume that these farms were not inhabited but rented out to neighbouring farmers who used more or less of the land for haymaking and grazing. No. 4 is based on a list of farms belonging to the convent at Reynista0ur in Skagafj6rOur, northern Iceland, in 144635 Here it is explicitly said that farms with low rent were not inhabited: a separate part of the list includes seven 'deserted farms' which are rented for 2 0 - 4 0 ells. Two farms are let for three years at a rapidly increasing rent from year to year, which apparently means that they are being restored after a long desertion. Five other farms are let for a low rent or (as it seems) none at all. So, 14 farms seem to be deserted or newly rebuilt, 37 are firmly hired for a reasonable rent, and the home farm makes the 38th inhabited farm. No. 5 is based on a similar list from the monastery of M66ruvellir in H6rg~dalur, northern Iceland, in 1447.36 Here the deserted farms are counted separately. For some of them a rent is paid, for one even a long hundred (120) ells. On the other hand, the inhabited farms, 34 in number, are all let for 100 ells or more. No. 6 shows the status of farms belonging to the See of H61ar in 1449.37 The

3:Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 4, 684-93 (no. 725). 33Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 4, 699-700 (no. 732). 34A comprehensive survey in English of the Icelandic system of land-hire can be found in Lfirusson, Icelandic Land Registers, 28-82. 35Diplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 4, 700-2 (no. 733). 36Diplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 4, 710-2 (no. 743). 37Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 5 (Kaupmannah6fn and Reykjavfk, 1899-1902), 35-41 (no. 35).

Old

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document enumerates 186 farms, beside the See itself. It does not distinguish systematically between inhabited and deserted farms, but criteria similar to those used in nos. 3 - 5 lead to the conclusion that only 23 farms were abandoned or were being restored at a low rent, apparently after a long desertion. As would be expected, the samples in Table 1 give very varied results. They are of course not picked randomly, and each of them is untypical in some way or another. On the other hand, they encompass 716 farms in all, probably not far from one-sixth of all farms in the country. In spite of all these difficulties, it is important to try to draw some conclusions to compare with the annalistic evidence, and this seems best done by calculating an average, hoping that the divergencies will outweigh each other. An average of the time-span from the plague to the time of the records in Table 1, weighed by the number of farms in each case, would fall in the year 1443, some 39 years after the end of the epidemic. An average of the desertion rates, also weighed by the number of farms, is 18%. To avoid giving any impression of misleading precision in these estimates, we may as well enjoy the comfort of round numbers and conclude-that some 40 years after the first epidemic receded, around 1444, some 20% of the farms in Iceland were still deserted. In order to proceed from this finding to the mortality rate in the epidemic, one must decide on two variables, neither of which is easily accessible for the Middle Ages. One is the rate of population growth during those 40 years. The other is the probably decreasing number of people on each farm after the plague, until all available land was in full use again, which would make the mortality rate higher than the desertion rate. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it is known that the population in Iceland was in normal times under strong pressure because of lack of access to land. Labourers normally had the status of domestic servants and remained unmarried. In these times demographic crises, whether caused by epidemics, famine or emigration to America, lifted the pressure temporarily. People married younger than before, when they could get a farm to live on. This lowered the number of persons per farm, as young people now left the home of their parents earlier. Additionally, crofters moved to independent farms, and farmers who had shared a farm parted and took over a whole farm each. All this means that the decrease in population led to a considerably smaller desertion of farms. Further, the change could lead to an immensely rapid growth in population after the crisis, because young married people have many children. In 15 years immediately after the great famine called MrduharOindi, in the period 1786-1801, the population grew by 24.6%, or on average by 1.6% annually. 38 We do not know for sure whether this population pressure already existed in Iceland by the beginning of the fifteenth century, but it is overwhelmingly likely that it did, at least to a certain extent. The first seemingly usable evidence about population numbers in Iceland is from around year 1100. Then, according to a twelfth-century chronicle, Ari's [slendingabrk, there were 4560 self-supporting farmers in the country. Those who were not, and received poor relief from the tithe, were not counted, A r i says.39 Around 3STrlfrceOihandbrk 1984. Statistical Abstracts of Iceland 1984 (Hagsk~rslur islands. Statistics of Iceland II:82) (Reykjavlk, 1984), 8-9. 39[s'lenzkfornrit, vol. 1 (Reykjavik, 1968), 23 (Chap. 10).

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1700 there were close to 4000 independent farms (li~gbfli) in Iceland 4° So, practically all farms that were later to be occupied in Iceland were already inhabited by 1100, and additionally there were some farmers who could not sustain themselves on the land they had access to. We do not know of any serious population crises between 1100 and 1400. In 1311 tax-paying farmers there were just over 380041 The diminution since c. 1100 is usually attributed to increased poverty rather than to depopulation. Therefore it seems likely that by 1400 the country was populated with a maximum number of people, whether they were around 50,000 as the more cautious estimates go 42 or close to 75,000, as has also been assumed 43 In the following model the assumption of population pressure is used rather cautiously: I assume that out of each 100 persons alive in 1402, 50 died in the epidemic. In the very first years this may not have led to an immense desertion of farms, while the survivors clung on to their homesteads, but fairly soon households reached a size which was practical in the circumstances: orphans were adopted by relatives or taken as servants to compensate for the lost workforce of dead servants; widows and widowers remarried, and so on. Still, it would be reasonable to assume that around 10 of these 50 survivors would use the opportunity to settle on farms which lay deserted after the epidemic. Thus, 50 inhabitants would occupy 60% o f the farms that had been occupied by our population of 100 before the epidemic. Suppose that a population growth of 1% a year occurred immediately after the epidemic. This growth would not lead to a considerable recolonization of land before about 20 years, but after the 40 years which provide the scale for our model, the oscillations would have equalled out, and we can safely suppose a direct correlation between the population growth and the process of recolonization of farms throughout the period. To keep the model simple, I leave out the population growth of the additional population, born after 1404. Thus a 1% annual growth of a population of 50 in 40 years provides an additional 20 persons. These 20 persons would inhabit 20% of the farms. So, by 1444 20% of the farms would still be deserted. The evidence of the number of deserted farms thus fits well with a 50% mortality rate suggested for the first epidemic. It might be reasonable to proceed with the same growth of population in absolute terms after 1444, thus assuming that the growth rate went down as the population became larger. Then, 95% of the pre-epidemic population would have been reached in 1494, when the second epidemic came to the country. This is of course quite imprecise, only conjectured to show that it is not necessary to postulate a smaller population or less population pressure at the time of the second epidemic. The country may well have regained its pre-1402 population by then. From the decades after the second epidemic we have very little and imperfect documentary material about desertion of land. Nothing of that kind seems to be applicable except a collection of chartularies from H61ar in 1525, three decades after the

4°B. Lfirusson, Old Icelandic Land Registers, 25-7, 33. 4~B. M. Olsen, 'Urn skattb~endatal 1311 og manntal ~i Islandi fram a~) 19eimtfma', Safn til s~gu islands, 4 (1907-15), 295-309. 420. L~irusson, 'Befolkning i oldtiden. 5. Island', Nordisk kultur, 1 (1936), 134-5. 4361sen, 'Um skattb~endatal 1311', 341, 356.

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Table 2 Desertion of farms in northern Iceland in 1525 No. 1 2 3 Total

Category

Total

Inhabited

Named farms of H61ar Farms of [aingeyrar Farms of ReynistaOur

286 97 51 434

265 62 44 371

Deserted 21 35 7 63

7% 36% 14% 15%

end of the epidemic 44 In many cases nothing is said about desertion of farms in these documents, too many to make it believable that it means no desertion at all. The results of this source are shown in Table 2. No. 1 applies to those farms owned by the See of H61ar which are named in the document 45 Apart from them, the See had now acquired entire communes or localities, where neither the number of farms nor their desertion rate is revealed in the document. But even among the named farms the list is problematic. The desertion rate, 21 out of 264, or 7%, is an absolute minimum and probably too low. Nos. 2 and 3 show the status of two monastic properties in the North, the monastery of laingeyrar and the convent of Reynista0ur. In these cases it is clearly stated how many of the farms are deserted 46 The difference between the individual cases in Table 2 warns against definite interpretations. Perhaps not much more can be concluded from this very limited material than that there was some farmland abandoned 30 years after the epidemic. Nonetheless, all its evidence points in the same direction, that there was less desertion after the second epidemic than after the first one. Thus, for instance, Table 1 shows a 27% desertion among the farms of ReynistaOur in 1446, forty-two years after the first epidemic, whereas in Table 2 the desertion rate is only 14%, thirty years after the second. To a certain extent this may be explained by emigration from the VestfirOir, which were spared by the second epidemic. The author of SkarOsdranndll claims to know that many poor people came from there to the North after the plague and settled down on good farms. Their descendants in the fourth and fifth generation were the contemporaries of the author, he says 47 But of course it is also possible that the mortality rate was considerably lower in the second epidemic, even where it raged. The testimonies of the annals about the mortality rates among priests in the H61ar diocese (nos. 6 and 7), although certainly a weak piece of evidence, give that impression too. If we make a model for the connection between the results of Table 2 and the mortality rate, using the same standards as before for population growth and movement of survivors to deserted farms, we arrive at a mortality rate of close to 43% outside the VestfirOir, which would amount to some 38% of the whole population. The estimates set forth here, based on desertion of land, do not fit badly with those

44Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 4SDiplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 4~Diplomatarium lslandicura, vol. 47Anntilar 1400-1800, 1, 75.

9 (Reykjav/k, 1909-13), 293-334 (nos. 266-78). 9, 301-2 (no. 266). 9, 314 (no. 268), 321 (no. 270).

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based on the annals above. In the first epidemic, in 1402-04, the annals were estimated to point to a 60% mortality rate, the desertion to 50%. They therefore point roughly in the same direction and allow us to conclude that a mortality rate of 50-60% is the most likely. In the second epidemic the estimate based on annals was 53% and that on desertion 38%. In this case the evidence is even weaker than in the first, so that it may be advisable not to make a more precise estimate than of a 30-50% mortality. If these estimates appear too dating or too high it can be pointed out that, even if we had reduced the figures by 10%, they would nonetheless have verified what is needed here, namely that the two epidemics in Iceland were no less lethal than the Great Pestilence in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Estimates of a 25-30% mortality rate in Europe as a whole are not uncommon, and they are high enough to make the Black Death an unique event in the history of diseases 48 There is no reason to doubt that we have the same disease to consider in Iceland in 1402-04 and 1494-95 as in Europe in 1347-50. Therefore it is important to prove, as conclusively as possible, that Iceland was not inhabited with rats in the fifteenth century.

Rats in Iceland As mentioned above, Ole JCrgen Benedictow firmly stresses that there must have been rats in Iceland during the epidemics there. He has three main arguments. Firstly, he points to the existence of cats and asks 'what induced the Icelanders to keep so many cats that they alone in the Nordic countries used clothing fur-lined with cat skins', if it was not for catching rats? Secondly, he says, the black rat is a ship rat and likes particularly to travel with stockfish and wool. As these were important commodities in Iceland, both in export and internal consumption, the rat would have ample opportunities to travel to the country and spread within it. Thirdly, his theory of the spread of the epidemic demands the presence of fleabitten rats; indeed he quotes with affirmation the words of another scholar, that 'if any proof of the presence of R. rattus in the ancient world is required, it is furnished by the very existence of plague' 49 None of these arguments is decisive. Concerning the role of cats, no-one doubts that there were mice in Iceland, and they alone would give the human inhabitants quite sufficient reason to keep cats. The likelihood of the rat coming to Iceland in ships and spreading there depends heavily on the question whether Iceland was hospitable enough for the black rat to thrive there. Graham Twigg, a zoologist, has argued strongly and convincingly that the black rat never had a taste for colonising England or the colder and more northerly parts of Europe, except for the warmer parts of towns.5° This means that, even if a pair of rats had survived the journey to Iceland, they would not have found a viable place to live there, let alone spread around the sparsely populated country with a winter temperature of around and below 0°C. Even the migration of the black rat within 48Ziegler, Black Death, 239. W. L. Langer, 'The Black Death', Scientific American, 210 (February, 1964), 114. Twigg, Black Death, 137. N. G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine. An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990), 42. 49Benedictow, Plague, 157-60, 219. 3°Twigg, Black Death, 75-89.

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medieval Iceland would demand behaviour of a kind which is untypical. It is said that the black rat has never been seen crossing even a small river, and scientific observation has proved that broad streets restrict its movements in towns.5 ~ In Iceland the rat would have had to cross a number of rivers, so deep and rapid that they could only be forded by horses at a few specially chosen places. There were no bridges over the large rivers and no carriages on wheels in the country in the Middle Ages. The rat would not have found a more comfortable vehicle on land than pack-horses. If people travelled between localities by sea, they must have used small, open rowing boats, which were not much better than horses. The question as to whether the plague proves the existence of rats will be answered in the final section. Here it will be pointed out only that Benedictow's model of the spread of plague through rat fleas meets in Iceland's case at least two serious obstacles. The first obstacle arises in connection with the activity of fleas in cold climates, even if we allowed the existence of their hosts. Plague research in this century has shown that the activity of the flea in question, X. cheopis, begins to decrease when the average temperature sinks below 18.3°C (a temperature rarely reached in southern and western Iceland, even in summer), and that a minimum temperature of 10°C is a condition for any spread of bubonic plague. In cooler weather the eggs do not hatch, and when the weather becomes frosty the flea hibernates. 52 Benedictow explains the activity of rat fleas, which his theory demands, with house-heating, which, he assumes, kept an indoor-temperature around 15°C. 53 About this no evidence exists, but I find Benedictow's guess far too high, and still it is not high enough to provide a very favourable environment for the flea. Of course, this depends essentially on which part of the year we are speaking about. Benedictow gives an overall description of the arrival and course of the plague in Norway, according to which it did not rage during mid-winter.54 But, as has been shown elsewhere, his argument on this point contains certain weaknesses:~5 He does not pursue the case in Iceland, and therefore does not mention in his book that both epidemics raged there throughout winter. The relevant evidence was presented above, where the course of the epidemics was described, but it may be worthwhile to quote verbatim the vow written at Munkalaverfi in the central North on 16 January 1403, where people promised acts of atonement 'against the terrible mortality which then raged stronger than ever before',s6 In a typical season the average temperature would then hardly have been above - 3°C in inland localities in northern Iceland.57 Concerning the second epidemic, the documents referred to above about its course in the winter 1494-95 deserve closer attention. A well-known lady, Solveig Bj6rnsdrttir, made her will at home, in Skar0 in Dalas2~sla, in the central West, on 17 January 1495.58 In the same year three men testified ~Shrewsbury, Bubonic Plague, 8. Twigg, Black Death, 79, 133. 52Twigg, Black Death, 114-7, 172. Cf. Benedictow, Plague, 165-8. Shrewsbury, Bubonic Plague, 3. 53Benedictow, Plague, 170. 54Benedictow, Plague, 73-102, 267. 55E. Ulsig, 'Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries', Historisk tidsskrift [norsk], 73 (1994), 97-99. 56Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 3, 682 (no. 571). j mote loeim hrcedeliga mandavda sem 1ha stod hardaz y f e F ....

~TM. ,'~. Einarsson, VeOurfar 6 [slandi (Reykjavik, 1976), 58, 70-1. 58Diplomatarium lslandicum, vol. 7, 242-7 (no. 297).

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that they heard of Solveig's death on 28 March.59 Her place and cause of death are testified in later documents, issued in connection with a lawsuit about her inheritance. There it says that Solveig died from plague in Au0kfla, Hfnavatnss3~sla, in northwestern Iceland, together with her son and other people who had come with her from the West 6° It seems clear that Solveig fled from her home in the central West in January, apparently because the plague was approaching. (January was not the month for voluntary migration in medieval Iceland.) But the plague has followed her to the North and reached her before 28 March. During the very coldest months of the year it invaded one of the coolest quarters of the inhabited lowland parts of the country. A second obstacle is the very mode of dissemination. Since the black rat is mostly immobile, Benedictow assumes that the disease spread mainly from fleas carried by men. (It must be kept in mind then that fleas do not catch the disease themselves, they only carry bacteria in infected blood in their stomachs, and eggs or larvae of fleas cannot carry it.) In Benedictow's opinion fleas spread locally when they were carried in clothes and luggage, but in Norway the transport of grain formed the crucial mode of inter-local and inter-regional dispersal 6~ However that may have been in Norway, no transport of grain could explain the rapid and thorough spread of plague in Iceland. 'Grain grows in few places in the South, and only barley', is recorded in a short description of Iceland from the fourteenth century.62 A surplus production of grain anywhere in the country can safely be excluded. Imported grain would have been brought from each harbour to its neighbouring district, so it would not have spread fleas between districts on any considerable scale. No alternative seems to be left except the transport of fleas in clothes and luggage, and then the spread of plague in Iceland was incredibly fast. The disease spread by fleas presupposes an epizootic in rats within each locality, because it is only when the rats die that the fleas are likely to attack people. Thus, according to Benedictow, fleas do not start infecting people until about a fortnight after the infection has reached a locality.63 As explained above, the first epidemic probably did not reach the harbour of Hvalfj6r0ur until September, and we know for sure that it raged in Skagafjrr0ur in the central North before Christmas. Thus, the plague had hardly more than 16 weeks to travel this distance of approximately 300 km. According to Benedictow, bubonic plague normally travelled at the speed of 0.65-1 km/day in the Middle Ages.64 In Iceland the epidemic seems to have reached the speed of at least 3 km/day. It cannot of course be determined with any certainty how often on its way the plague had to develop an epizootic in rats anew. A reasonable model, though, might be to assume that it did so at least once in each commune, a locality of some 25 farms on average, before it went on to the next one. Then it would not start to attack people in

SgDiplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 7, 256 (no. 307). 6°Diplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 14, 582-4 (no. 413), 609 (no. 430). 6~Benedictow, Plague, 180-92, 270-2. 62Biskupa siSgur, gefnar tlt af Hinu islenzka b6kmentaf~lagi, vol. 2 (Kaupmannahrfn, 1878), 5 (Saga GuOmundar Arasonar, Prologus). ~3Bcnedictow, Plague, 75-6. 64Benedictow, Plague, 80.

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Skagafj6r0ur until after 14 epizootics, probably by the middle of March 140365 It makes this mode of transmission even less likely, since plague research has revealed that travellers from districts where bubonic plague rages do not carry many fleas on them. Thus in Java, in a group of 1829 persons, with 393 plague patients among them, only seven rat fleas were found 66 The probability of a disease spreading in this way in a sparsely populated country such as Iceland seems to be practically nil. It can thus be seen that the assumption of a population of rats in Iceland helps very little in explaining the course of the plagues. But there is also a strong evidence that there were no rats in the country in the Middle Ages. According to Benedictow, the absence of skeletal finds of rats in Iceland is the only argument that carries some weight against his thesis. Nevertheless he refutes it as a reflection of 'the incipient developmental stage of zoo-archaeology' in the country 67 It is true that no extensive research results have yet been published in this field. But the little that we have is negative. Thomas Amorosi has summarised the results of skeletal finds in seven places and different periods in different parts of Iceland. No rats were discovered there, but, admittedly, no mice either.68 Other individual research has not discovered medieval rats either. Thus in Bessasta0ir, where an extensive excavation has been carried out, reaching back to the colonisation period in the Viking Age, no rat has been discovered before the seventeenth-century layers. Then, some of the very first brown rats in Europe so far discovered left their skeletons there 69 Written records do not yield any traces of rats either. There are two words for 'rat' in m o d e m Icelandic, valska, cognate with walloon in English and probably referring to a French origin of the creature, and rotta, a loan-word from German or Danish. Neither of these words occurs in medieval Icelandic, nor Norwegian, texts.7° Walloon mice (m~ss valskar) occur in Kn~tlinga saga, a history of Danish kings, in an episode that takes place in Denmark. A certain Danish earl was visited by a number of walloon mice, 'much bigger than people had seen before', which ended by killing the earl 7~ The strangeness of the creatures is obvious in the story. If someone objects that medieval authors were interested in more honourable things than rats it should be mentioned that mice occur over twenty times in medieval Icelandic and Norwegian texts. Some authors have maintained that the absence of rats in early medieval texts in

~SThe assumed division into communes is based on/~rni Magndsson's and Pfill Vfdalfn's Land Register from the first decade of the eighteenth century. See A. Magntlsson and P. Vfdalfn, JarOab6k, vols 4, 8 (Kaupmannah6fn, 1925-27). ~Twigg, Black Death, 129. 67Benedictow, Plague, 160. 68T. Amorosi, 'Contributions to the Zooarchaeology of Iceland: Some Preliminary Notes', in: The Anthropology of lceland, ed. E. P. Durrenberger and G. P~ilsson (Iowa, 1989), 208-9. 6~Norse and Later Settlement and Subsistence in the North Atlantic, ed. C. D. Morris and D. J. Rackham (Glasgow, 1992), 123, 172-3. 7oj. Fritzner, Ordbog over Det gamle norske Sprog, vols 2-3 (Kristiania, 1891-96); vol. 4, Rettelser og tillegg red Finn H6dneb6 (Oslo, 1972). S. Egilsson, Lexicon Poeticum Antiquae Linguae Septentrionalis. Ordhog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog. Oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbj6m Egilsson, forcget og p~ny udgivet for Det kongelige nordiske oldskriftselskab. 2. udgave ved Finnur J6nsson (Kcbenhavn, 1931). Eva Rode, editor at the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose of the Arnamagnaean Commission in Copenhagen, personal communication. 7'[slenzkfornrit, vol. 35 (Reykjavfk, 1982), 197-8 (Chap. 614).

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Europe is due to the inability of their authors to distinguish between rats and mice. In the case of Icelandic authors, who were very 'close to earth', both in their writings and in their actual life, I tend to agree with Shrewsbury, that the idea 'does not deserve serious consideration' 72 The strongest evidence for the absence of rats in medieval Iceland, however, is the testimony of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors who state that rats are unknown or, later, that they are newcomers in the country in their times, la6r0ur laorl~iksson, bishop of Sk~ilholt, wrote a description of Iceland in Latin, which was published in 1666. There he says explicitly that no rats exist in Iceland, but on the other hand an abundance of m i c e . 73 A Danish author, Peter Resen, relates substantially the same in his book about Iceland two decades later. TM Probably he was just repeating the bishop's statement, but nonetheless he obviously did not know better. Finally, two Icelanders, educated in natural history, Bjarni P~ilsson and Eggert Olafsson, travelled around Iceland for a number of years in the 1750s and collected material for an extensive description of the country, which 01afsson later wrote and was published in two volumes in Danish in 1772. This is a celebrated work, both for its comprehensiveness and its trustworthiness. 01afsson does not mention rats in his book, except in his description of the Snrefellsnes peninsula in western Iceland. There, he says, is an abundance of rats, recently arrived on a ship that had stranded at R/f, a place on the northern coast of the peninsula. 75 Eggert uses a latin term, M u s d o m e s t i c u s m a j o r , which applies to the black rat according to the natural historian Bjarni Sremundsson, but S~emundsson is not convinced that 01afsson was correct in this. However that may be, the black rat, Sremundsson wrote in 1932, never settled permanently in Iceland. "The brown rat first appeared here in the nineteenth century, he says (for S~emundsson did not know what lay concealed in the midden at Bessasta0ir) and has been spreading around the country since then, especially in the coastal districts. 76 I see no reason to distrust these authors and know no evidence contrary to theirs. It is hardly conceivable either that a rat which would have been present to spread a plague to and within practically every nook and corner of the country in the fifteenth century could have died out. The only exterminator that springs to mind is the plague itself (although I know no instance where plague is said to have exterminated rats). But the course of the two epidemics in Iceland even excludes that remote possibility. If the rat had disseminated the first epidemic it would have had to be present in the VestfirOir as well as elsewhere, and there the second epidemic would have left it intact, ready to recolonize the country. For zoological reasons it is not a plausible theory that the epidemics in Iceland were rat-borne plague. And historical evidence seems to disprove it conclusively.

72Shrewsbury, Bubonic Plague, 12. 7310.10orl~iksson,Island. Stutt landl~sing og s6guyfirlit. Lj6sprentun frumftgfifunnar f Wittenberg 1666, fisamt fslenzkri [h)Oingu (Reykjavik, 1982), 38-9. 7410.Thoroddsen, LandfreeOissaga islands. Hugmyndir manna um island, ndtttiruskoOun og rannsrknir, fyrr og slOar, vol. 2 (Kaupmannahtifn, 1898), 183, 186. 7SE. 01afsson, Vice-Lavmand Eggert Olafsens og Land-Physici Biarne Povelsens Reise igiennem Island, foranstaltet af Videnskabernes Stelskab i KiiSbenhavn, vol. 1 (SoriSe, 1772), 354. 76B. S~emundsson, Spend~rin (Mammalia lslandiee) (Reykjavfk, 1932), 278-83.

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What were the epidemics in Iceland? Nothing in the Icelandic sources seems to support Graham Twigg's theory that the medieval plague was in fact anthrax.77 No mortality of any kind of animals is ever mentioned in the annals, which certainly could be expected in a society which relied as heavily on animal husbandry as the Icelandic one, if such mortality had taken place. It must be added though, that the annals relating the epidemics are few and brief, and one must be ready to accept that important omissions may occur in their narratives. Oeding's theory of bubonic (and septicaemic) plague carried by the human flea, Pulex irritans, does not sound plausible either, if only because of the high virulence of the epidemics during the coldest months of the year, when the human flea would be hibernating, like its relative, X. cheopis. On the other hand, I do not find convincing the arguments with which Benedictow counters J6n Steffensen's theory of primary pneumonic plague. An important part of Benedictow's argument concerns the interpretation of a clause in contemporary Icelandic annals, where the symptoms of plague patients in Norway are described. Steffensen was of the opinion that the description applied to primary pneumonic plague and argued that since the Icelanders considered that the same disease was at work in the epidemics in both Norway and Iceland, in spite of a time-span of half a century between them, the same symptoms would have appeared in Iceland.78 The clause goes as follows in probably the most original version in L~gmannsanndll: 79 laat var kyn s6ttarinnar at menn lif0u eigi meirr en eitt d~egr e~r tv6, mec7 hi~rdum stinga. Eftir laat setti at bl6Osp2~ju, ok f6r 19ar 6ndin me~ sinn veg. J6n Steffensen has translated the passage thus: 8° The nature of the sickness was such that men lived not more than one day or two, with great pleuritic pain, whereupon they began to vomit blood and then the spirit passed on its way. Benedictow castigates Steffensen for inserting the word pleuritic into the text, thus making it sound unambiguously as a description of pneumonic plague. Instead he offers his own translation: 81 the disease was such that men did not live for more than a day or two with sharp pangs of pain, then they began to vomit blood, and then they expired. The fact is, however, that Steffensen's translation of the noun stingi (gen., acc., dat. stinga) is perfectly in accordance with a generally accepted understanding of the word. In the Icelandic-English Dictionary by Cleasby and Vigftlsson it is translated with 'a 77Twigg, Black Death, 211-22. 7XSteffensen, 'Plague in Iceland', 44-5, 53. Steffensen, Menning og meinsemdir, 324-5, 338. 791slandske Annaler, 275-6, cf. 224. 404. The spelling is normalised here and italics added. 8°Steffensen, 'Plague in Iceland', 43. My italics. JBenedictow, Plague, 226.

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stitch in the side'.82 The Norwegian medical historian Reichborn-Kjennerud understands it as denoting the symptoms of pneumonia and pleurisy.83 Nor do primary sources give much ground for any other interpretation. The word occurs five times in medieval Icelandic and Norwegian texts, besides the above mentioned occurrence in the annals. 84 In Norway it is used twice in law texts, in apparently synonymous clauses about a man's responsibility for a slave he sells, against stjarfi a n d s t i n g i 85 It is not clear what these words mean here, but obviously s t i n g i is not just any pain, for it must be a severe incapacitating or lethal disease; pleurisy or tuberculosis is Reichborn-Kjennerud's guess.86 There are two occurrences in Icelandic sagas, and in both cases it is absolutely clear that the word refers to a severe pain in the thorax. One of them says that the pain was 'in the side and over the chest' the other 'under the arm'. 87 The only problematic occurrence is in a fifteenth-century Icelandic manuscript in a text about the treatment of plague: 88 'Also, when one feels that he had caught this disease, what one can discern by s t i n g i inside or outside with extreme pain and a boil...'. This may mean that s t i n g i can be either internal or external, but it is also possible to read the sentence as offering two alternative symptoms: (1) s t i n g i inside and (2) external pain and a boil. In modern Icelandic the word occurs in the form s t i n g u r and refers predominantly to pain in the chest. In all likelihood it did so in the medieval language also. Benedictow says accusingly that Steffensen's translation 'offends clearly against one of the most basic methodological conventions of historical science'. 89 I have shown that this is wrong. Indeed, Benedictow himself seems to commit a minor offence, when he translates the singular s t i n g i with a plural p a n g s o f p a i n , not only here, but on three more occasions in his book.9° This wrongly suggests that the pain is not restricted'to a definite part of the body but may refer to pain in widespread carbuncles, the most obvious symptoms of bubonic plague. Finally, Benedictow's main argument against the theory of primary pneumonic plague, both in Norway and in Iceland, is that during the current pandemic of plague, since the late nineteenth century, it had never caused such a major epidemic as those in medieval Norway and Iceland. The largest epidemic recorded, he repeats at least six times in his book, in Manchuria in 1910-11, killed only 0.4% of the population, in spite 82R. Cleasby and G. Vigfusson, Icelandic-English Dictionary, based on the ms. collections of the late Richard Cleasby, enlarged and completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson (Oxford, 1874). 83I. Reichborn-Kjennerud, Vdr gamle trolldomsmedisin, vol. 4 (Oslo, 1944) (Skrifter utgitt av Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo. II. Hist.-Filos. Klasse. 1943. No. 2), 92. 84Fritzner, Ordbog. Egilsson, Lexicon. Eva Rode, editor at the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose of the Arnamagncean Commission in Copenhagen, personal communication. 85Norges gamle Love indtil 1387, udgivne ved R. Keyser og P.A. Munch, vol. 1 (Christiania, 1846), 29, 182. In the orginal: viO stiarva oc viO stinga and viO stinga oc viO stiarva. 86Reichborn-Kjennerud, Vdr gamle trolldomsmedisin, IV, 92. 87Biskupa s6gur, vols 1 and 2 (Kaupmannah6fn, 1858), 182 (J6ns saga helga, Chap. 29: hann hafdi sffnga tekit svd haettligan, at hann mftti varla draga 6ndina firir sdrleikinum, peim er fylgOi. Verkrinn 16 mest { s{Ounni ok fyrir brj6stinu...). [slenzk fornrit, vol. 7 (Reykjavfk, 1936), 360 (Bandamanna saga, Chap. 12: kennir Hermundr, at stingi kemr undir h6ndina...). 88AlfraeOi {slenzk. lslandsk encyklopaedisk litteratur, vol. 3, Landal~,singar m.fl. Udgivet ved Kr. K~lund (Kcbenhavn, 1917-18), 78: Item fyst rnadr kennir sig tekinn vera i pessare sottenne, sere hann kann at marka af stinga innan til edr utan med aese-verk ok sull .... 89Benedictow, Plague, 226. 9°Benedictow, Plague, 31, 45, 71.

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of uniquely favourable circumstances for its dissemination. It claimed 60,000 lives, 50,000 of them from the Manchurian population of 12 million 7~ It seems to have escaped Benedictow's notice that exactly the same riddle arises in connection with bubonic plague within the current pandemic. According to Twigg, the highest percentage of a population dying from plague per annum since 1896 occurred in Ceylon 1914-17, namely 0.305%. In India the epidemic in 1896-1917 claimed 'only' about ten million lives out of a population of 329 million. The mortality rate is around 3% altogether, and it took more than two decades to reach it.92 Twigg does not include the Manchurian epidemic 1910-11 in his survey, but if he had, and divided the 0.4% mortality rate over two years, that would have made it the second most lethal plague epidemic of the current pandemic, measured in deaths per year as a proportion of population. It may be objected that a comparison of the medieval epidemic with a twentiethcentury one is meaningless because of new preventive measures in the later case. If that is so, the objection would apply to a comparison of epidemics of pneumonic plague no less than to the bubonic variant. According to Morris, the great pneumonic epidemic in Manchuria would have spread much more, 'but for the heroic counter-measures taken by the great Chinese doctor Wu Lien Teh [one of Benedictow's greatest authorities on plague] who was most fortunately put in charge'.93 On the other hand, hardly any effective counter-measures were taken during the first years of the predominantly bubonic plague in India which started in 1896, because the true mode of infection was not yet known. Some of the measures are even said to have spread the plague, as infected rats were driven farther afield by a flood of disinfectants which were sprayed into the houses. 94 Still, during the first three years after the outbreak of the epidemic in India, a period which was sufficient for the Black Death to sweep the continent of Europe, the plague only managed to kill roughly 0.1% of the population. 95 Of course these numbers should not be taken literally. It must in many cases be a matter of opinion what is to be understood as a single population; in what sense was there an Indian population in 1896-1917? Nevertheless, it is perfectly clear that the last hundred years have not experienced anything comparable with the Black Death. The pneumonic form of plague cannot alone be excluded for that reason. It seems to me that Benedictow, and most students of the medieval plague, have been far too unobservant of the fact, which has been known and accessible to laymen in biological sciences for a considerable time, that bacteria change their behaviour through mutation. In 1982 Nancy Siraisi warned for that reason against 'excessive reliance upon medical and demographic accounts of fairly recent outbreaks of plague...' .96 Since then it has even been pointed out that the bacterium in question, Yersinia pestis, has certain characteristics which indicate that it has undergone a mutation that has altered its

~Benedictow, Plague, 27, 32, 72, 220, 259, 267. ~2Twigg, Black Death, 195-6. 93Morris, 'Plague in Britain', 208-9. ~4L. F. Hirst, The Conquest of Plague. A Study of the Evolution of Epidemiology (Oxford, 1953), 111-20. 9~Twigg, Black Death, 197. 9~'N. G. Siraisi, 'Introduction', The Black Death. The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague. Papers of the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, ed. D. Williman, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 13 (New York, 1982), 11.

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virulence.97 I realise that mutation is a deus ex machina in the history of disease; it can solve all problems and thus spoil all rules of the game. But since we know that it exists, we cannot ignore it. Indeed, we are more dependent on historical sources about the history of diseases than before, as our knowledge about their natural behaviour proves to be less reliable. If we accept the theory of mutation, anything seems possible (at least to the layman), so that it may give Steffensen's thesis of primary pneumonic plague an infinite number of new rivals. It has been suggested by Twigg, for instance, that some relative of the bacterium Yersinia pestis might have been at work in the Black Death.98 It seems to me, however, that Steffensen's theory requires the fewest 'tricks' on Nature's part. Steffensen has, for instance, explained the spread and retention of plague in Iceland by assuming that people got the infection from clothing.99 Benedictow corrects him, referring to experts who say that objects are rarely infective, even though they are infected. 1°° But could that not have changed through mutation since 1495? This, however, is not the main point for me, since my chief object is to remove the black rat from the scene, both from medieval Iceland and from the medieval plague epidemic. If the disease could persist in Iceland for nineteen months and kill approximately half the population, without the presence of rats, something similar Can have happened elsewhere.

97R. E. Lenski, 'Evolution of plague virulence', Nature, 334 (11 August, 1988), 473-4. 98Twigg, Black Death, 209-10. 99Steffensen, 'Plague in Iceland', 41, 53. Steffensen, Menning og meinsemdir, 338. ~°°Benedictow, Plague, 224.