Further vernacular glosses in this manuscript of John of Garland’s Morale Scolarium are all in Anglo-Norman, suggesting that also this word needs to be interpreted as Anglo-Norman and not English (or even Latin). It is to be noted that this unique late thirteenth-century usage is dated well before the earliest English and Continental French attestations given by the OED and TLF (i.e. second half of the fifteenth century) – perhaps surprisingly, considering the existence of the Classical Latin etymon pestis, which seems to have been common in medieval Latin as well.