In the spring of 1348, Louis Heyligen, a musician in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna at Avignon, sat down and wrote to friends in Bruges about what he was watching. Half the city was dead, he said. The Pope had bought a field for the overflow of corpses, and it had filled inside six weeks. He described the three forms the sickness took, the one in the lungs that killed within two days and spared nobody, the one with swellings under the arms and in the groin, and the one with fever and swellings together.

The sick fled the well, and the well fled the sick. He did not know whether he would live to see the letter delivered. He did. Most of the people he described did not.

The plague that emptied Avignon was only one door out of a house with many doors. Leprosy took the feeling from your hands so gradually that people lost fingertips to rats in their sleep. A fungus in the bread turned your legs black and let them come away at the knee. A fever arrived at breakfast and had you in the ground by nightfall.

Beneath all of it lay the question of what any of it felt like from the inside, hour by hour, for the person lying there. The doctors of 1348 worked from a map with no germs on it. Nobody had seen a bacterium, and nobody would for three hundred years. A trained doctor believed in the four humors inherited from Galen: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

Health was balance, sickness was one of them running hot or cold, and the cure was to drain off the excess or fight it with its opposite. Above the humors sat the air itself, corrupted air, miasma rising off swamps and rotting bodies that could poison a whole city. Above the air sat the stars, and the medical faculty at the University of Paris pointed to a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the sign of Aquarius in March of 1345, which had drawn foul vapors up out of the earth and sea. Above the stars sat God, who had every reason to be angry.

When you got sick, all four layers came down on you at once. In October of 1347, twelve Genoese galleys came into the harbor at Messina on Sicily, and the sailors on board were dying. A Franciscan writing on the island described a sickness that seemed to cling to the very bones with swellings on the thighs and arms and a fever that killed inside days. The Messinese drove the ships back out of port, though far too late.

Behind those galleys was the Black Sea, where a notary from Piacenza wrote the account everyone quotes about the trading post at Caffa in the Crimea. A Tatar army besieging the Genoese walls was itself being destroyed by the disease, and in his telling, the Tatars loaded their dead onto catapults and hurled the corpses over the walls. The stench in the crowded city became unbearable, and the Genoese who fled by sea carried the sickness home with them. From Messina it went everywhere.

Genoa and Pisa by the turn of the year, Marseille by November, Avignon by January of 1348, Florence and Siena in the spring, Paris by the summer. It came ashore in England at Melcombe in Dorset around the end of June 1348, was in Bristol by August and London by the autumn, and worked north through the whole of 1349. By 1352 it was in Moscow. The generally accepted numbers put the dead somewhere between a third and three-fifths of Europe in five years, twenty-five to fifty million people.

The bacterium that emptied medieval London was identified in 2011 when a team took teeth from four skeletons in the East Smithfield burial ground, the emergency cemetery London opened in 1348 when the churchyards filled, and pulled Yersinia pestis DNA out of the dried pulp inside. They rebuilt the whole genome. It differs from the modern strain by only about ninety-seven letters out of four and a half million, near enough the same organism that still kills a few hundred people a year in Madagascar. Same bug, wildly different body count.

The difference sat in the people and in the world they lived in. The disease came in three forms, and medieval doctors could tell them apart without knowing why. The first and most common was bubonic. A flea, usually one that had fed on a dying rat, bites you on the leg or ankle.

Nothing happens for two days, sometimes as many as seven. Then it arrives suddenly, the way a door slams. A fever that shoots past thirty-nine degrees, a headache so severe that people described it as a blow, shivering fits, aching in the back and thighs, vomiting sometimes with blood in it. Light becomes painful.

Within about a day came the thing that gave the disease its name. The bacteria traveled from the bite up the lymph channels to the nearest lymph node, and the node began to swell. If the bite was on the leg, that was the groin. If on the arm, the armpit.

If on the face or scalp, the neck behind the ear. The node filled with bacteria and dead white cells and swelled to the size of an egg, then an apple, and the skin over it stretched tight and turned red, then purple, then black. The pain of the bubo comes up in every source that bothers to describe it, a hard, hot, exquisitely tender mass so painful that patients could not bear the weight of a sheet on it and could not be moved on the bed without screaming. Some bubos stayed hard and closed.

Some softened over days and burst on their own, releasing a thick greenish-yellow pus with a smell of rot coming out of a body that was still alive. Within two or three days, a patient who had been lucid and terrified became confused, then incoherent, then unconscious. The tongue swelled and turned white, then dark. The extremities went cold and dusky as the circulation failed, and the breathing went shallow and fast and then stopped.

From the first shiver to that point was most commonly three to five days. Untreated bubonic plague killed somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of the people who caught it, and everyone who lived through the Black Death had watched people survive it. To them it felt like a lottery being drawn in front of them twice a day with their own children’s names in the bowl. The second form was the true horror, pneumonic plague.

The bacteria got into the lungs, either because a bubonic case had gone septic and seeded them from inside, or far more dangerously because you breathed in droplets coughed out by someone who already had it. The incubation dropped to a day or two. You woke with a fever, a headache, and a tightness in the chest, and you started to cough. At first it was dry.

Then the sputum came up thin and watery. Then it was streaked. And by the second day you were coughing up bright red frothy blood, mouthfuls of it, foaming. The air sacs of the lungs were filling with blood and fluid, and every breath churned it.

Untreated pneumonic plague is as close to universally fatal as any disease we know. What the dying felt was suffocation, slow and then fast. The lips and fingernails went blue, the chest heaved, and each breath brought up more blood and less air until the patient was drowning, sitting up, clawing at the bedclothes soaked with what they had coughed. This is the form that made Guy de Chauliac, the Pope’s own physician, right that people caught it not only by living in the same house but merely by looking at one another.

They were describing airborne transmission four hundred years before anyone had a word for it. The third form, septicemic plague, happened when the bacteria flooded the bloodstream directly. The body’s clotting system went haywire, with tiny clots forming everywhere at once while the blood ran out of clotting factors and started leaking. Blood seeped under the skin in purple sheets and came out of the nose, the gums, the bowel, the bladder.

Fingers went black, toes went black, the tip of the nose, the ears. This form killed almost everybody it touched, and it could kill within a day before a bubo ever had time to rise. People spoke of victims going to bed healthy and being found dead in the morning. In Florence, Boccaccio wrote that brother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, and hardest for him to believe, fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their own children as if they were strangers.

The Florentines dug trenches beside the churches, enormous ones, and bodies went into them by the hundred. Marchione di Coppo Stefani, who lived through it as a boy, gives the detail everyone remembers: the trench was dug down to the water table, bodies laid in and covered with a little earth, then more bodies on top and more earth, layer on layer, just the way you put layers of cheese in a lasagna. Boccaccio reckoned that more than a hundred thousand people died inside the walls of Florence between March and July of 1348, and the tax records and guild rolls that survive suggest the city lost something like half its people. Giovanni Villani, the great chronicler of Florence, wrote his last entry about the plague and stopped in the middle of a sentence.

The space after the words is still blank. He had died of it. In Siena, Agnolo di Tura, a shoemaker who did some tax collecting, kept a record harder to get through than Boccaccio’s. The mortality began in Siena in May of 1348, a cruel and horrible thing.

Fathers abandoned children, wives abandoned husbands, brothers abandoned each other, and nobody could be found to bury the dead for money or for friendship. People carried their own dead to the trenches without a priest, without an office, and tossed them in. The bells did not ring for anyone. The ditches were shallow, and dogs came at night and pulled corpses out and ate them in the streets.

Then in the middle of all of that, one plain sentence: And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. Nobody wept for any death, he wrote, as everybody expected to die, and people believed and said it was the end of the world. In England, the disease came ashore in Dorset around midsummer of 1348 and reached London in the autumn. Henry Knighton, a canon at Leicester, described sheep and cattle wandering untended through the fields and crops rotting where they stood with nobody left to bring them in.

In one pasture alone, he says, five thousand sheep died and lay putrefying so foully that neither bird nor beast would touch them. Prices collapsed. A good horse that had been worth forty shillings went for six and a half, a fat ox for four. Nobody wanted anything, and nobody expected to live to use it.

When the survivors started to want things again, no hands were left to make them, and wages doubled, which Knighton, a landowner’s man to his bones, found almost as scandalous as the deaths. He also records that the Scots, hearing that the plague was destroying the English, gathered an army in the forest of Selkirk in 1349 to take advantage of it. Then the plague reached the camp, about five thousand died there in a short time, and the survivors broke up and went home to their villages and took it with them. The sickness that had been an English affliction became a Scottish one within the year.

Somewhere between a third and half of the benefited clergy of England died in the space of a year, a figure that comes from bishops’ registers which recorded every vacancy. Priests died for the same reason physicians did. They went into the rooms. And when they stopped going in or were dead, a problem arose that terrified medieval people far more than the physical pain: dying unshriven.

Dying without confession and absolution meant facing judgment with your sins still on you. In January of 1349, Ralph of Shrewsbury, the bishop of Bath and Wells, put out a letter to be announced in every parish of his diocese. He wrote that the plague was leaving many parishes without priests, that the sick were dying without the sacrament of penance, and he instructed that anyone in danger of death should make their confession to any lay person who was to hand, and he added, to a woman if a man was not available. That was an astonishing thing for a bishop to write.

Across the west of England that winter, dying men and women were whispering their sins to a neighbor, a servant, a child, whoever was in the room and had not run. The pit at East Smithfield is where you can still see all of this. The city bought the land in 1348 when the parish graveyards were full, and when it was excavated in the 1980s, archaeologists found long trenches with bodies laid in rows up to five deep, most in shrouds, some in coffins, children tucked in beside adults. They counted something over two thousand four hundred individuals, and the ground almost certainly holds more.

What struck the excavators was how orderly it was. Somebody had kept the rows straight. Somebody had faced the bodies east. In the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to the city, men were still standing in a trench doing the job properly.

People tend to forget that the plague came back in 1361 and in 1369 and in 1375 and in the 1390s, and it kept coming back somewhere in Europe every few years for three hundred years. A man born in 1400 could expect to see the plague come through his town four or five times in his life, and each time it was a lottery again. The Black Death was only the first draw. What could a physician actually do for you once the fever was up?

He could bleed you. That was first and always. The theory said the pestilential poison had corrupted the blood near the heart, and the doctor’s job was to help the body push it outward toward the swellings. So he would open a vein with a small blade called a fleam or lancet on the side of the body where the bubo was and let the blood run into a bowl until you fainted.

Some patients were bled repeatedly over several days. None of it helped, but it was something being done, and a physician who did nothing had no reason to be in the room. The bubo itself came next. If it came to a head, the surgeon would open it, and then cauterize the wound with a hot iron to burn out the corruption.

At the top end of the market was theriac, a paste of anywhere from forty to seventy ingredients that included viper flesh, cinnamon, myrrh, and a serious quantity of opium. The opium did one thing that nothing else in the plague pharmacy could do: it took the edge off the pain and let you sleep. If you were rich enough, you could die drugged instead of screaming. The one piece of advice that actually worked was the oldest.

Flee quickly, go far, come back late. The trouble was that most people could not flee, and the ones who could often carried it with them. In 1377, Ragusa, the city we call Dubrovnik, ordered that anyone arriving from a plague area had to wait on an island for thirty days before entering, and Venice later stretched that to forty, a quarantina, and the word quarantine grew out of that. It was the first real defensive measure anyone in Europe hit on, and it came from watching ships rather than from any theory of medicine.

As the disease spread, a story spread ahead of it that the Jews were poisoning the wells. The story seems to have started in the south of France in the spring of 1348, fed by confessions extracted under torture. At Strasbourg, the plague had not yet reached the city, and the bishop and the governing magistrates had refused to act on the poisoning stories. On the ninth of February 1349, the guilds rose, threw out the magistrates, and put in a new council.

Five days later, on St. Valentine’s Day, the Jews of Strasbourg were rounded up and taken to their own cemetery, where a wooden platform had been built, and they were burned alive on it. The priest and chronicler Jakob Twinger von Königshofen, writing within living memory of it, says around two thousand died. The debts owed to the Jews were declared cancelled, and the money and pledges they had held were shared out among the guildsmen.

The chronicler says in as many words that the money was the poison that killed the Jews. Clement from Avignon issued two bulls that year ordering the clergy to protect the Jews. He pointed out that Jews were dying of the plague at the same rate as everyone else, and that the disease was raging in places where no Jews lived at all. Very few towns listened.

For the person in the bed, all of this meant that the culture around them was building an entire way of dying while they lay there. The Ars Moriendi, the art of dying, was a set of manuals that circulated after the plague, and they set out what the dying man should expect. Five temptations came at the deathbed: doubt, despair over sins, impatience with pain, pride in goodness, and clinging to the things of the world. The point was that dying was a contest you could lose at the last minute.

A good death, when it could be managed, went something like this. The dying person was propped up in bed facing east. The priest came with the host in a box and a boy with a bell walking in front. Confession first, whispered with everyone else sent out.

Then the anointing oil on the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet for the sins each had committed. Then the viaticum, the last communion, the bread for the journey. A blessed candle was put into the dying person’s hand and held there, sometimes by a relative when the grip failed, and a crucifix was held up before the eyes, and the litany was said over and over while the breathing slowed. That was the death everyone hoped for and paid for and prepared for.

Almost nobody got it in the summer of 1348, and the people who did not get it knew exactly what they were being denied. The plague gave you five days. Leprosy gave you twenty years, and it spent them taking you apart a piece at a time while everyone you knew watched. The bacterium Mycobacterium leprae is astonishingly slow, and it can sit in the body for years before anything shows.

When it does show, it starts at the surface in the skin and in the nerves that run just under it, cool places first: fingers, toes, the tip of the nose, the ears, the eyebrows. Early on, a patch of skin loses its color and its feeling. You can prick it with a needle and the patient does not flinch. Then the nerves running to the hands and feet begin to thicken and die, and the muscles they served waste away, and the fingers curl inward into a claw that will not open.

The loss of feeling is where the real damage happens. A man with dead nerves in his hands picks up a pot from the fire and does not feel it burn. He walks on a foot with a stone in the shoe until the sole is an open ulcer. He sleeps, and a rat gnaws his fingertip, and he wakes with a wound he cannot explain.

The wounds do not heal properly. The bone underneath is eaten away, and over years the fingers and toes shorten and are absorbed or come off. Meanwhile, in the severe form, the skin of the face thickens into nodules, the bridge of the nose collapses, the voice goes hoarse, and the eyes dry and scar and ulcerate because the loss of feeling in the cornea stops the blinking reflex. The smell of a person in the late stages of untreated leprosy was, by every account, something you could pick up across a room.

And it went on like that for years. A leper diagnosed at twenty-five might not die until forty-five, and the thing that killed him in the end was usually something else. Diagnosis was a formal event, and the stakes were enormous. A false diagnosis stripped a man of his home and his trade.

If the panel said yes, the law took over, and the law had been thinking about lepers for a very long time. The Lombard King Rothari in his edict of 643 ruled that a person found to be a leper and expelled from the community was to be treated as if dead, tam quam mortuus. He could not sell or give away his property, though the community was still obliged to feed him. By the later Middle Ages, it had a liturgy, the separatio leprosorum.

In its fullest form, the leper was brought to church wearing a black cloth, and mass was said for him as if he were dead, with him kneeling under a black pole in the place where a coffin would go. Then the priest walked him out to the churchyard to an open grave and threw three spadefuls of earth over his head and said the words: be dead to the world and alive again to God. Then came the list. He was forbidden to enter a church, a mill, a bakehouse, a market, or a tavern.

Forbidden to wash in a spring or stream, or to drink from a well except from his own cup. Forbidden to touch anything he wished to buy except with a stick, and forbidden to touch children. He was given a clapper or a bell or a rattle to sound as he came so people could clear the road ahead of him. You were buried while you stood there.

Your wife was in most places free to remarry. Your children inherited. You were, as far as the parish records went, gone. The most famous leper of the Middle Ages was a king, and his tutor noticed the first sign.

William of Tyre, who taught the young Baldwin of Jerusalem, tells of the boy playing with other children who were pinching each other’s arms, as boys do, and noticing that Baldwin never cried out. When William looked, the child’s arm had lost all feeling. Baldwin was crowned at thirteen in 1174. By sixteen, he was fighting Saladin, and at Montgisard in 1177, with his right arm already too damaged to use, he led a charge that routed the Egyptian army.

Over the following years, the disease did what it does. His face changed. His hands lost their fingers. Ulcers opened on his body.

He went blind. By his early twenties, he could not ride or walk and was carried into the field in a litter, still giving orders, still refusing to give up the crown to men he did not trust. He died in 1185, aged twenty-three. Ergotism came out of the bread.

Rye grows well on poor northern soil, and in wet years a fungus called Claviceps purpurea infects the ears and replaces individual grains with hard purple-black growths called sclerotia, which look a little like a rat’s droppings or like the spur on a cock’s leg. Ground into the flour with the rest, they carry alkaloids that clamp down the blood vessels and, in a different dose, act on the brain. The gangrenous form is the one the sources called the holy fire, ignis sacer or St. Anthony’s fire.

It began with a burning sensation in the hands and feet, a sense that the limb was on fire from inside. Then the limb went cold. The blood vessels feeding it had narrowed until nothing came through. The skin went pale, then blue, then black, and the flesh dried and hardened and shrank onto the bone.

Then the dead part came away, sometimes at the joint cleanly with almost no blood. Accounts describe people whose feet fell off while they were walking, whose hands separated at the wrist. Around 1095, a nobleman named Gaston of Valloire saw his son recover from the fire at the shrine of St. Anthony the Hermit and founded a hospital order in gratitude.

The hospital brothers of St. Anthony spread across Europe over the next two centuries. Inside, the patients were washed, given a balm made from pork fat and herbs, and above all fed on the hospital’s own bread made from clean grain the brothers grew themselves. So they got better, and the brothers got credit for a miracle.

They had noticed that people who came to them stopped rotting, even if they had not worked out why. The English sweating sickness came from nowhere, killed like nothing else, and left. It arrived in 1485 in the same season Henry Tudor landed to take the crown from Richard III, so that the first Tudor king came to London with a new disease at his back. It came again in 1508, in 1517, in 1528, and in 1551, and after that it never came again, five visits in sixty-six years, mostly confined to England.

The onset was sudden and total, a feeling of dread, then a cold shivering that shook the whole body, then pain in the head, neck, and shoulders, then within an hour or two the heat and the sweat. It poured off the body. The patient soaked through, the bedding drenched, and the sweat itself foul-smelling. The heart raced, breathing became hard.

Some people felt an overpowering urge to sleep, and physicians believed that if you let them sleep, they died. So relatives were told to keep the patient awake by any means for a full day and night. Within a day, it was over, one way or the other. Death came in three hours or six or twelve, rarely more than a day.

Edward Hall, the chronicler, has the phrase that everyone quotes: people married at dinner were dead at supper. What most disturbed contemporaries was who the sweat chose. Plague went for the poor and crowded. The sweat went for the healthy, the young, the well-fed, and it went for men more than women.

Nobody knows what the sweating sickness was. The organism, whatever it was, has left no trace anyone has found. It simply stopped. Smallpox came on with fever and backache and vomiting and then the rash, first in the mouth and throat, then on the face, then spreading down the body.

Over about a week, the spots rose into pustules, tense and hard, and in the confluent form the pustules ran together into sheets so that the whole face was one raw weeping surface. The eyelids swelled shut, the skin peeled away in patches, and the smell, which every account mentions, was of a body decaying while alive. Confluent smallpox killed most of the people it touched, and those who lived through it often lost their sight. A great many of the blind beggars on the roads of medieval Europe were there because of smallpox.

Dysentery killed more soldiers than most battles did, and it killed several kings. King John of England died of it in 1216, carried in a litter to Newark Castle, where he died on the night of the eighteenth of October with the flux still running out of him. Edward I, his grandson, died of the same thing in 1307 at Burgh by Sands on the edge of the Solway on his way to fight the Scots one more time. Henry V’s army at Harfleur in 1415 lost something like five thousand men to it before a sword was raised, and the sick were shipped home by the boatload.

What was left of the army went on to Agincourt and won. Seven years later, Henry himself was besieging Meaux in another wet season, and he caught it. By the summer of 1422, he could not sit a horse, and on the thirty-first of August he died, aged thirty-five, a king who had never lost a battle, shrunken and fouled in a bed. By some accounts, his body was boiled to strip the flesh from the bones so the bones could be carried home for burial at Westminster.

Scurvy belonged with the crusaders. Jean de Joinville, who went with Louis IX on the crusade to Egypt in 1250, left the clearest eyewitness description of it in the medieval record. The army had been in the Nile Delta for months, eating salt meat and biscuit and fish from a river full of corpses, and then a sickness went through the host. The flesh of the legs dried up and the skin became covered in black spots, and he compares it to an old boot.

The gums swelled and rotted and grew over the teeth so that men could not eat, and to eat at all they had to have the barber surgeons cut the dead flesh away from their gums. And Joinville says that when the barbers were doing this, the whole camp could hear the men crying out, and he compares the sound to women in labor. The marshes had their own fever, ague, which was malaria carried by mosquitoes in the standing water of the fens and the Italian campagna. It came in cycles, a shaking fit so violent the teeth chattered and the bed shook, then a burning fever, then a drenching sweat and collapse, and then two or three days later the whole thing over again.

Children in the marsh parishes died of it in large numbers, and the survivors carried it in their blood for life. Rome was so malarial that the papal court moved to the hills every summer. Childbirth killed women at every rank, and the deaths were as bad as anything in this story. The chamber was closed, windows shuttered, fire lit, men excluded, the midwife and the neighbor women in attendance.

If the birth went well, it went well, and most did. If it did not, almost nothing could be done. A child lying crossways could not be turned by anyone who did not know how, and few did. The labor went on for a day, then two, then three, until the mother died of exhaustion or of the infection that followed.

If the child was dead and stuck, the midwife or a barber surgeon would reach in with a hook and bring the child out in pieces. If the afterbirth did not come away, she could bleed out onto the straw in minutes. And if she came through the birth, childbed fever was waiting. Two or three days after delivery, a mother would begin to shiver, the belly would swell and become exquisitely tender, and within a week she would be dead of an infection carried into her body on the unwashed hands of the very women trying to help her.

Nobody understood that for another four hundred years. A cesarean section existed and was performed only on the dead. If a mother died with the child still inside her, the priest or the midwife would open her belly with a knife to get the infant out before it died too, because the point was baptism. The famine came thirty years before the plague, and the frail bodies in the East Smithfield trench were made in it.

The rain started across northern Europe in the spring of 1315, and it did not stop. It rained through the summer, and the crops rotted in the fields. The hay could not be cut, so the animals had nothing for the winter. The next year was as bad, and the year after not much better, and on top of it a disease went through the cattle.

Grain prices went up threefold and fourfold. What people ate, the chroniclers list: dogs, cats, horses, the bark of trees ground up, grass, roots. Parents abandoned their children. Children were sold.

Crime went up sharply, and in more than one place the chroniclers write that people ate the dead or killed to eat. The urban death toll across the famine years is usually put at somewhere between one in ten and one in four. The children who survived the famine on bark bread grew up with the marks of it in their teeth and their shin bones. And those were the bodies that went into the East Smithfield trenches thirty years later.

The plague did not stop at the edge of Christendom. Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveler, was in Damascus in the summer of 1348 and watched the whole city go out beyond the walls to pray. The governor ordered a fast of three days, and on the fourth morning everyone came out barefoot, the Muslims with their Quran, the Jews with their Torah, the Christians with their gospels, all of them weeping and calling on God together. The death toll in Damascus had reached twenty-four hundred a day by then.

The Muslim world lost roughly the same proportion of its people as Europe did, and it had no wells to blame and mostly no one to burn. Two royal deaths stand out from the plague years. Princess Joan, the daughter of Edward III, was traveling south in the summer of 1348 to marry Pedro, the heir to Castile. She was fourteen.

Her party landed at Bordeaux, and the mayor warned them the sickness was in the city, and for reasons nobody wrote down, they stayed. Her retinue started dying. Joan herself died on the first of July in a house in the town. Her father wrote to Alfonso of Castile that he had lost a daughter in whom all the virtues had been gathered, and that he could not write of it without grief.

No record survives of her body ever coming home to England. Her intended father-in-law, Alfonso, refused to lift the siege he was conducting at Gibraltar when the plague appeared in his camp, and it killed him on the twenty-seventh of March 1350, the only reigning king in Europe to die of it. One more voice from the plague years, from Kilkenny in Ireland in the summer of 1349. A Franciscan friar called John Clyn was keeping the annals of his house, and he kept them through the pestilence.

He wrote that in Kilkenny, scarcely a house could be found in which only one had died, that the priest and the man he had confessed were often carried to the grave together. He counted the friars who died at Drogheda and at Dublin, twenty-five in the one house and twenty-three in the other. He wrote that he had seen so much evil that he had put it all in writing while waiting among the dead for death to come, in case anyone of the race of Adam should survive it. Then he left a stretch of blank parchment for them.

After the blank, in a different hand, is one line. It says that here, it seems, the author died.