Medieval historians have often downplayed how the First Pandemic, also known as the Justinianic Plague, affected Britain. A new study is challenging this notion, and even suggests that the plague may have struck the British Isles at least twice.
Rachel Singer, a PhD student at Georgetown University, offers a new analysis of this early medieval pandemic by making use of recent palaeogenetic findings from Edix Hill, a burial site near Cambridge. Her article appears in the journal The English Historical Review.
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Genetic traces of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague, were identified in multiple individuals buried at the Edix Hill. Moreover, radiocarbon dating of Edix Hill remains has yielded ranges between 416 and 541 CE, predating the traditionally recognised outbreak of the Justinianic Plague.
Singer finds this evidence to be very important in challenging long-held assumptions that the plague traveled overland from the Mediterranean through Europe before reaching Britain. Instead, the evidence suggests that the disease may have reached Britain independently, possibly via northern trade routes.
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“I think plague is likely to have been conveyed to Britain at least twice (potentially way more times!) via luxury and everyday trade routes and the movement of people across the English Channel,” Singer tells Medievalists.net. “There was tons of contact between Britain and the wider post-Roman world, and any of it could have shuttled plague to or from the island.
“Prior historians have really latched onto the archaeologically visible trade in luxury goods between the Eastern Mediterranean/North Africa and modern-day Wales to explain how plague got to Britain, and I do think it’s possible Y. pestis spread to the west of Britain via that route, but I’m also interested in ways it could have gotten to the East (where Edix Hill is) from Northern Europe, perhaps without Mediterranean mediation. But it’s really too early to identify definitively what brought it there – I was just trying to point out the possibility and what it means that nobody’s considered it seriously yet!”
For those of you who (wisely) haven’t been on Twitter lately and may not know, I recently had an article come out in the EHR on early medieval British plague and its broader historiographical implications. Just message me if you don’t have access and need a pdf!
These discoveries not only question the established narrative of the plague’s spread but also challenge the “Mediterranean-centric” view of the pandemic. Scholars have historically framed the First Pandemic as a primarily Mediterranean phenomenon. The Edix Hill evidence suggests that Britain and other peripheral regions may have played a more significant role in the spread of the disease than previously recognised.
This outbreak has usually been called the Justinianic Plague or the Plague of Justinian, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (527-565). However, Singer does not favour this term. She explains: “I don’t like the name “Justinianic Plague” for the pandemic as a whole because it encourages people to assume that the Byzantine experience of the pandemic is the ‘normal’ one and that the eastern Mediterranean is where the pandemic ‘really mattered’ It also isn’t super fair to Justinian – it’s not like the pandemic was his fault!
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“I think it can still make sense to use the name to refer only to the initial, 540s outbreak of the pandemic in Constantinople and its environs. But it doesn’t make much sense at all to call the entire First Plague Pandemic the ‘Plague of Justinian,’ since it lasted from the 540s to the 760s and encompassed plenty of areas very different from the eastern Mediterranean that experienced plague in unique ways.
“Plague is an extremely ecologically sensitive disease, and the way it behaves in a location is dependent on environmental factors like climate, terrain ruggedness and soil salinity as well as social ones that affect rodent, insect, and human population density and which segments of society are most exposed to the pests that carry plague. So it really does not make sense from an epidemiological perspective to treat the whole pandemic like a single phenomenon centered in Constantinople, and I fear that the name encourages some scholars to do just that – to take Constantinople’s well-documented experience of the pandemic and assume that every single area where we recover plague paleogenomes must have had the same one. “
The study highlights the importance of combining palaeogenetics, archaeology, and textual analysis to create a more accurate picture of historical pandemics. However, gaps in the record, including the absence of early plague genomes from the eastern Mediterranean, mean that the exact route of transmission to Britain remains uncertain.
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These findings could reshape how historians and archaeologists view Britain’s place in the early medieval world. Rather than being a backwater disconnected from wider Eurasian networks, the evidence suggests Britain was an active participant in these exchanges. The study also calls for a reevaluation of how peripheral regions contributed to global historical processes, such as the spread of pandemics.
The article, “Contextualising Edix Hill: First-Pandemic Plague and Britain,” by Rachel Singer, appears in The English Historical Review. Click here to access the article. You can also learn about Singer’s research through her personal website.
Top Image: One of the earliest surviving copies of Ptolemy’s 2nd century map of the British Isles. Originally published in Ptolemy’s Geographia. This is the second issue of the 1482 map, also printed at Ulm, which was the first woodcut map of the British Isles and the first to be printed outside Italy. Wikimedia Commons
Medieval historians have often downplayed how the First Pandemic, also known as the Justinianic Plague, affected Britain. A new study is challenging this notion, and even suggests that the plague may have struck the British Isles at least twice.
Rachel Singer, a PhD student at Georgetown University, offers a new analysis of this early medieval pandemic by making use of recent palaeogenetic findings from Edix Hill, a burial site near Cambridge. Her article appears in the journal The English Historical Review.
Genetic traces of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague, were identified in multiple individuals buried at the Edix Hill. Moreover, radiocarbon dating of Edix Hill remains has yielded ranges between 416 and 541 CE, predating the traditionally recognised outbreak of the Justinianic Plague.
Singer finds this evidence to be very important in challenging long-held assumptions that the plague traveled overland from the Mediterranean through Europe before reaching Britain. Instead, the evidence suggests that the disease may have reached Britain independently, possibly via northern trade routes.
“I think plague is likely to have been conveyed to Britain at least twice (potentially way more times!) via luxury and everyday trade routes and the movement of people across the English Channel,” Singer tells Medievalists.net. “There was tons of contact between Britain and the wider post-Roman world, and any of it could have shuttled plague to or from the island.
“Prior historians have really latched onto the archaeologically visible trade in luxury goods between the Eastern Mediterranean/North Africa and modern-day Wales to explain how plague got to Britain, and I do think it’s possible Y. pestis spread to the west of Britain via that route, but I’m also interested in ways it could have gotten to the East (where Edix Hill is) from Northern Europe, perhaps without Mediterranean mediation. But it’s really too early to identify definitively what brought it there – I was just trying to point out the possibility and what it means that nobody’s considered it seriously yet!”
These discoveries not only question the established narrative of the plague’s spread but also challenge the “Mediterranean-centric” view of the pandemic. Scholars have historically framed the First Pandemic as a primarily Mediterranean phenomenon. The Edix Hill evidence suggests that Britain and other peripheral regions may have played a more significant role in the spread of the disease than previously recognised.
This outbreak has usually been called the Justinianic Plague or the Plague of Justinian, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (527-565). However, Singer does not favour this term. She explains: “I don’t like the name “Justinianic Plague” for the pandemic as a whole because it encourages people to assume that the Byzantine experience of the pandemic is the ‘normal’ one and that the eastern Mediterranean is where the pandemic ‘really mattered’ It also isn’t super fair to Justinian – it’s not like the pandemic was his fault!
“I think it can still make sense to use the name to refer only to the initial, 540s outbreak of the pandemic in Constantinople and its environs. But it doesn’t make much sense at all to call the entire First Plague Pandemic the ‘Plague of Justinian,’ since it lasted from the 540s to the 760s and encompassed plenty of areas very different from the eastern Mediterranean that experienced plague in unique ways.
“Plague is an extremely ecologically sensitive disease, and the way it behaves in a location is dependent on environmental factors like climate, terrain ruggedness and soil salinity as well as social ones that affect rodent, insect, and human population density and which segments of society are most exposed to the pests that carry plague. So it really does not make sense from an epidemiological perspective to treat the whole pandemic like a single phenomenon centered in Constantinople, and I fear that the name encourages some scholars to do just that – to take Constantinople’s well-documented experience of the pandemic and assume that every single area where we recover plague paleogenomes must have had the same one. “
The study highlights the importance of combining palaeogenetics, archaeology, and textual analysis to create a more accurate picture of historical pandemics. However, gaps in the record, including the absence of early plague genomes from the eastern Mediterranean, mean that the exact route of transmission to Britain remains uncertain.
These findings could reshape how historians and archaeologists view Britain’s place in the early medieval world. Rather than being a backwater disconnected from wider Eurasian networks, the evidence suggests Britain was an active participant in these exchanges. The study also calls for a reevaluation of how peripheral regions contributed to global historical processes, such as the spread of pandemics.
The article, “Contextualising Edix Hill: First-Pandemic Plague and Britain,” by Rachel Singer, appears in The English Historical Review. Click here to access the article. You can also learn about Singer’s research through her personal website.
You can learn more about the Edix Hill cemetery here.
Top Image: One of the earliest surviving copies of Ptolemy’s 2nd century map of the British Isles. Originally published in Ptolemy’s Geographia. This is the second issue of the 1482 map, also printed at Ulm, which was the first woodcut map of the British Isles and the first to be printed outside Italy. Wikimedia Commons
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