Rising above Conway is Caer Seiont, where are circles of stones and embankments, the remains of a camp probably dating from the Irish possession of Gwynedd. The railway is carried through a tunnel in a spur of the hill. A glorious view is obtained from the summit, of the sea, the Great Orme’s Head, and the valley of the Conway dotted with houses. Near the mouth of the river on the further bank is Deganwy, once the royal residence of Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd, a bold warrior, but terribly nervous about his health, apparently, for when the Yellow Plague, in 547, broke out he took to his heels. However, the plague went after him, and he died of it.
But Maelgwn was not the only one to run away. Teilo, Bishop of Llandaff, fled, taking with him his clergy, and sheltered in Brittany till the disorder had passed. The Yellow Plague would seem to have been a very infectious sickness attacking the bilious glands and producing jaundice. It spread to Ireland and committed frightful ravages both there and in Britain. As neither Bede nor the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes any allusion to it, the plague cannot have touched the English, but was confined to the Celtic lands. It, however, broke out again in 664.
PLAS MAWR, CONWAY
The plague of 547-50 created the liveliest panic. In Ireland it was thought that the only escape from it was to put “seven waves” between the soil of Erin and a place of refuge, and monks and princes fled to the islands. Maelgwn, in a panic, assumed the habit of a monk, and escaped to the church of Llanrhos, intending to go further, but died there. It is curious that twice again a plague was thought to have originated in Wales. The next was the Sweating Sickness, the germs of which were carried to Bosworth by the army of Richmond, and which after the victory there spread in a few weeks from Bosworth and the Welsh mountains to London. Those afflicted with it had their powers prostrated as by a blow; they suffered intense internal heat, yet every refrigerant was certain death. Not one in a hundred who was attacked escaped at first. The physicians were bewildered; they turned over the pages of Galen and found that the disease was not described there, nor were any remedies prescribed for any malady that at all resembled it. Death came quickly; a day and a night after a man was attacked he was a corpse. The battle of Bosworth was fought on August 22nd, 1485, and Henry entered London on the 28th. Immediately the Sweating Sickness began its ravages. The Lord Mayor and six aldermen died within a week. The sickness struck at the most vigorous and robust men, and from London it spread like wild-fire throughout the kingdom. The coronation of the King had to be postponed, and did not take place till October 30th.
As the physicians were quite at a loss how to deal with the malady, the people looked to common sense, and found that the best of doctors. Directly a man felt the fire in him, and the sweat began to stream from every pore, he took to his bed, not even staying to take off his clothes, and was given only liquids, and these hot.
The plague broke out again in 1551, not exactly in Wales, but at Shrewsbury. All the spring clammy fogs had hung over the Severn valley, and suddenly, on April 15th, the Sweating Sickness again appeared. The visitation was so general at Shrewsbury and in the basin of the Severn that everyone believed that the air was poisoned. The disease came unexpectedly and without warning—at table, during sleep, on journeys, in the midst of amusement, and at all times of the day. Some died within an hour of the attack; none who had it mortally survived four-and-twenty hours.
Crowds of fugitives escaped to Ireland and Scotland, some embarked for France or the Netherlands, but it was remarked that the Sweating Sickness struck down only the English, not foreigners in England, nor did it spread from the refugees abroad. Within a few days nine hundred and sixty of the inhabitants of Shrewsbury died.